BOOK 1: Table of Contents
Dedication: “to my Mother and my aunt Hilda, without their help this wouldn’t exist, in any timeline.”
CHAPTER 1: The Girl Who Heard Too MuchCHAPTER 2: PART ONE: 3:47 AM - FEBRUARY 3 (Diminuto’s Apartment)CHAPTER 3: PART ONE: FEBRUARY 10 - MORNING (The Shop)CHAPTER 4: PART ONE: FEBRUARY 18 - MORNING (The Gift)CHAPTER 5: PART ONE: 2:00 PM - MARCH 9 (Diminuto’s Office, UAB)CHAPTER 6: PART ONE: BEFORECHAPTER 7: PART ONE: MARCH 12 - MORNING (The Call)CHAPTER 8: PART ONE: MARCH 20 - 3:47 AM (The Obsession)CHAPTER 9: PART ONE: APRIL 10 - MORNING (The Watcher)CHAPTER 10: PART ONE: APRIL 20 - 3:00 AM (The Network)CHAPTER 11: PART ONE: MAY 15 - AFTERNOON (The Visit)CHAPTER 12: PART ONE: JUNE 1987 (The Formula)CHAPTER 13: PART ONE: SEPTEMBER 5 - THE SIGNALCHAPTER 14: PART ONE: OCTOBER 3 - THE DEPTHCHAPTER 15: PART ONE: NOVEMBER 7 - THE INVITATIONCHAPTER 16: PART ONE: JANUARY 1988 (The Cold)CHAPTER 17: PART ONE: APRIL 1988 (The Map)CHAPTER 18: PART ONE: SEPTEMBER 1988 (The Preparation)CHAPTER 19: PART ONE: ALEX - 11:30 PM (The Approach)CHAPTER 20: PART ONE: ALEX - FEBRUARY 3, 1989 (The Reckoning)
CHAPTER 1
The Girl Who Heard Too Much
**POV:** Alex Hartwell **Date:** January 28, 1987, 3:17 AM - 11:38 PM **Location:** Birmingham, Alabama ----- ## PART ONE: 3:17 AM Alex Hartwell woke up screaming. Not the nightmare kind where you jolt awake confused about which world is real. This was worse. This was every nerve in her skull suddenly on fire, like someone had shoved a fork into an electrical socket except the socket was her entire head. She thrashed sideways out of bed, got tangled in her grandmother’s quilt (the one with the sunflowers that looked cheerful in daylight and like dying things at 3 AM), and hit the floor hard enough to bruise her shoulder. Then she just lay there, breathing like she’d sprinted a marathon in her sleep. Something was wrong with the world. Not wrong like broken. Wrong like *different*. Like someone had cranked up the brightness and contrast on reality while she was asleep, and now everything was too sharp, too loud, too *much*. Her clock radio—the Sony that Thomas had given her for Christmas two years ago—was glowing. Not just the display. The whole thing seemed to pulse with this weird energy she could almost see, like heat shimmer off summer asphalt. Like the air around it was vibrating at a frequency that made her teeth itch. The clock face showed **3:17 AM** in red LED numbers. The numbers themselves looked sick and wrong, pulsing like they were trying to communicate something. The radio’s chrome casing caught light from somewhere—the streetlight outside? —and threw it back at her in waves. That wasn’t normal. Clock radios didn’t do that. Alex pulled herself up on the edge of her bed, trying to breathe through her nose like they taught in PE when you were about to puke from running too hard. The clock radio hummed at her. Not with sound, exactly. With something else. Something that bypassed her ears entirely and went straight into her skull. The refrigerator downstairs was doing it too. Three floors away, through walls and insulation, and she could feel it like a pressure behind her eyes. Different from the clock. Deeper. Like a bass note she couldn’t hear but could sense vibrating in her bones. The old Westinghouse unit—avocado-colored, probably installed in the early 1970s—was broadcasting something. *Okay*, she thought, using the voice she used during horror movies to keep herself from freaking out. *This is fine. This is totally normal. I’m just having some kind of seizure or something. People have seizures. It’s a medical thing. * She looked at her hands. They were shaking. They looked like someone else’s hands—someone scared, someone with good reasons to be scared—which meant they couldn’t be her hands because Alex Hartwell was fine. Alex was great. Alex was just lying on her bedroom floor at three in the morning while her house hummed at her like a giant electric beehive. ----- ## PART TWO: 6:00 AM (School Gets Closer) School started at 7:50 AM. Alex knew this because she’d been to Ramsay High School every day for two years, and the routine was as fixed as the laws of physics: wake up (allegedly), shower, eat breakfast while Dad read the newspaper, catch the bus at 7:30, arrive at school by 8:00 for first period. Today was January 28th. Wednesday. She made it through the shower by keeping her eyes closed and telling herself that the pipes weren’t singing, that the water heater in the basement wasn’t pulsing with that same weird rhythm as everything else. Hot water. Then cold water. Then that weird lukewarm moment when the tank was adjusting. All perfectly normal appliance behavior. Breakfast was cereal. Her mother had passed out on the couch again (gin bottle on the coffee table, same as usual), so it was just her and Dad in the kitchen. Dad was reading the *Birmingham News*, folding it into quarters the way he always did, scanning the pages with an intensity that suggested he was looking for something specific. Some kind of code hidden in the classified ads or the weather report. “You look tired,” he said, not looking up from the paper. That was technically true, though it also failed to capture the existential terror that had been gnawing at her since 3:17 AM. The cereal was Lucky Charms. The milk was cold. The kitchen was warm from the oven (Dad had made toast), and the radio on top of the refrigerator—a Sony transistor model, cream-colored, from probably 1975—was playing something soft and synthesizer-heavy. Prince, maybe. Some 1980s pop thing that was occupying the early morning slot on WBRC-FM. The marshmallows—little hearts and stars and moons, dyed in lurid colors that no natural food should be—seemed to float in the milk like tiny islands. She didn’t usually pay attention to them, but they seemed especially vivid this morning. Especially present. “Did you sleep at all?” Dad asked, still not looking up from his paper. “No.” He turned the page with the precise, methodical care of someone performing a ritual. The newspaper crackled. The radio played. The refrigerator pressed against her awareness like a held breath. It was 6:47 AM. ----- ## PART THREE: 8:15 AM - 1:45 PM (School) Ramsay High School was a concrete bunker from the 1960s that looked like someone had tried to design a prison and accidentally added too many windows. The fluorescent lights buzzed. All of them. Every single tube in every single hallway, creating this constant high-pitched whine that made Alex feel like her brain was being slowly sanded down. Which, in retrospect, might have been the point. Hard to notice anything strange when the background misery is constant. The tubes themselves—long rectangles of phosphorous and mercury vapor—threw off a sickly pale light that made everyone look like they were already dead. The hallways were painted institutional beige, with the occasional splash of school spirit posters (CRIMSON TIDE PRIDE in red letters, a drawing of an elephant that looked like it had been made by Picasso, age 4). Like someone had forgotten what enthusiasm looked like and just painted words on the wall hoping students would catch it. Lockers lined the walls—metal, dented, covered in stickers and scratches. The smell of the hallways was a mix of industrial cleaner (that burning chemical smell that never quite went away), sweat, and something else. Adolescent desperation, maybe. Or the death of potential. She made it through homeroom by gripping her desk until her knuckles went white. Mr. Stephens read attendance off a clipboard like he was performing a sacred ritual. Nobody was absent. Nobody was ever absent. You could be literally dying and Ramsay High would still want you to sit in a plastic chair for forty-five minutes while Mr. Stephens read your name in alphabetical order. The PA system—a speaker mounted in the corner, protected by a metal cage—crackled to life with some announcement about basketball tryouts. The voice came through tinny and distorted, but underneath the distortion was that *thing*. That pattern. That frequency-she-could-feel-but-not-hear pattern. Even the announcements were infected. She made it through English (Period 2) by staring at *To Kill a Mockingbird* and not thinking about the way the intercom speaker above Mrs. Patterson’s desk—cream-colored, round, with little holes for sound—was pulsing with that weird shimmer. Mrs. Patterson was discussing the moral implications of the trial, which was important, except also there was a weird frequency underneath everything and nobody else seemed to notice.” *It says society is run by things broadcasting on frequencies humans aren’t supposed to hear*, she could have said. Instead: “Um.” Mrs. Patterson seemed satisfied with this insight about the fundamental complexity of human nature. She made it through algebra (Period 3) by sitting in the back and pretending to focus on quadratic equations while the pencil sharpener on the windowsill—unplugged, broken, completely dead since sometime in 1984—glowed at her like it was trying to communicate something important about the breakdown of institutional equipment maintenance. A dead pencil sharpener. Glowing. With no power source. *That’s fine*, Alex told herself with the deadpan certainty of someone whose brain had already accepted that reality was broken. *That’s totally normal. Unplugged things glow all the time. This is a completely ordinary Wednesday. * Except broken electrical devices definitely shouldn’t glow. By lunch—in the cafeteria that smelled like institutional potato and mystery meat, where students sat under more fluorescent lights and ate food off plastic trays—she’d developed a solid theory: either something had happened to her brain overnight (stroke, tumor, psychotic break, take your pick), or something had happened to reality itself and she was just the lucky girl who got to experience it. Both options continued to suck. The cafeteria’s main serving line had a sneeze guard made of acrylic plastic, and behind it were the food warmers. Stainless steel containers with heat lamps, all of them glowing with that shimmer. The mystery meat—gray-brown substance of unknowable origin, served by lunch ladies in hairnets who seemed to have accepted their role in this institutional machine—was broadcasting something. Which raised the question: had the mystery meat been weird all along, or was the frequency making it weird? Were the lunch ladies complicit, or just tired? Did anyone care? So when she found herself walking toward the photography darkroom in the basement—she was taking photography as an elective, one of the few classes that didn’t make her want to claw her eyes out—she was already primed for weird stuff. Already mentally prepared for the universe to keep throwing curveballs. The darkroom was in the basement level, down a concrete stairwell that smelled like old masonry and chemicals. The lights down here were different—less fluorescent, more incandescent. Warmer. Less designed to slowly erase your personality. It was quiet. Not silent. But quieter than anywhere else in the school. The red safelights didn’t buzz the way the fluorescents did—they just glowed a constant, warm red that made everything look like it was underwater. The room didn’t shimmer and pulse like everywhere else. Just a steady two-tone hum. It was almost peaceful. Almost normal. Almost like being allowed back inside herself. ----- ## PART FOUR: 1:50 PM (Photography Documentation) “Document something that interests you,” Mrs. Chen announced, handing her the Polaroid. “Use the school camera. Turn in results by Friday. Any subject—architecture, people, nature, whatever.” Alex picked up the camera. It was a battered Polaroid SX-70—the kind with the automatic focus and the built-in flash, probably donated in the late ’70s—the kind of thing that looked like an artifact even in 1987. It felt warm in her hands. Not just body-heat warm, but warmer than it should be. Aware. Conscious. Which was crazy. But what if she could photograph what she was seeing? The thought hit her like a punch. What if the Polaroid didn’t care whether she sounded insane? What if it just showed her what was there? Fast film could freeze moments too quick for perception. Long exposures could show star trails invisible to the naked eye. What if the Polaroid—with its electronic flash and its ability to produce instant prints—could somehow see electromagnetic fields? Could somehow detect the thing that made her skull ache? It was insane. You couldn’t photograph invisible frequencies. You couldn’t photograph the thing that made appliances glow. You couldn’t photograph whatever this *was*. Or could you? It was worth a shot. The fluorescent light in the main hallway was just a light. Rectangular panel, institutional design, nothing special. Alex pointed the Polaroid at it and clicked the shutter. There was a mechanical whirring sound as the film advanced. The print ejected from the camera’s slot—a tangible, physical piece of evidence. The image that developed over the next sixty seconds was wrong. The light itself was fine—properly exposed, clear, exactly what you’d expect from a photograph of a fluorescent fixture. But around it, there was this… *distortion*. Like a halo. Like looking at a candle through heat shimmer, except this wasn’t heat. This was something the Polaroid’s lens had *seen* that shouldn’t have been there. The distortion looked almost like reality was slightly out of focus in that specific spot. Like the space around the light was vibrating at a frequency the camera could detect but human eyes mostly ignored. Alex took another shot. Different angle. Same result: the fixture was normal, but something around it was warped. Bent. Like reality itself was slightly off-kilter. She photographed three electrical outlets scattered throughout the school. All showed the same thing—clear image of the outlet, weird shimmer around the edges. A glow. A pulse captured on film. She snuck out to the parking lot and found the big electrical junction box on the side of the building—the one mounted on the concrete wall, big gray metal container with warning stickers about high voltage. The one that had been making her teeth hurt all day just from standing near it. The photograph came out looking almost broken. The distortion was so intense the Polaroid image seemed to vibrate even after it had fully developed, the colors bleeding slightly, the shimmer so pronounced it looked like the entire box was surrounded by invisible flames. By 4:15, Alex had sixteen Polaroids stuffed in her backpack, each one showing something that shouldn’t be possible. Each one proving she wasn’t crazy. Unless she was hallucinating the distortions in the photos as well. Either way, she had evidence now. ----- ## PART FIVE: 4:30 PM - 5:15 PM (Walking Home) The walk home was twelve blocks down Clairmont Avenue. Alex had done it a thousand times—down past the Winn-Dixie supermarket (with its bright fluorescent signs advertising weekly specials), through the neighborhood with the big oak trees that dropped acorns on the sidewalk every fall. Boring. Safe. Normal. Not today. Today the power lines were alive. She could see them now, really see them, strung between utility poles like the world’s ugliest Christmas lights. Each one glowing with that shimmer, that overexposed aura, pulsing in rhythms she could almost count. And they were all connected. She’d always known they were connected. She just hadn’t known they could notice her. The transformers at the top of the poles were especially bright. Metal cylinders painted gray, containing oil and magnetic coils and all the machinery required to step down voltage from the distribution lines to neighborhood levels. Each one a node in a vast neural network. A car drove past with its radio blaring. Top 40. Synth-pop and drum machines. Prince or maybe Duran Duran. But underneath the music—underneath it, like a watermark or a secret track—there was something else. Alex stopped walking. It wasn’t the shimmer from the electrical stuff. This was different. Deliberate. Mathematical. Patient. Something that felt like it was trying to communicate something to anyone who could perceive it. The car was already gone, but she could still feel it. That pulse. That hidden signal buried under Casey Kasem’s countdown, broadcast through every radio in the city. Through every TV. Through the whole electromagnetic spectrum, probably, if she could figure out how to tune into it. Her skull ached. She started walking again. Faster now. Past houses where TVs flickered behind curtains—she could see the colors changing as channels switched, the glow of cathode ray tubes providing light and that pulse, that frequency—each one adding its own note to the chorus. , and even the hip-hop had that pattern underneath it. That thing. That signal that someone or something was broadcasting to everyone, and no one seemed to care. The streetlights came on (on automatic timers, probably triggered by light sensors) just as the sun touched the horizon. Each one flickering to life with a slight delay, sodium vapor lamps creating that yellow-orange glow that made everything look like it was underwater. By the time she got home at 5:15 PM, Alex went straight to her room, pulled out the geometry textbook she’d hollowed out months ago for storing stuff she didn’t want found, and hid the sixteen Polaroids inside, tucking them between the pages where no one would look. Then she lay on her bed and tried not to think about what she’d felt out there. She failed. ----- ## PART SIX: 10:00 PM - 11:15 PM (Night Crisis) Sleep wasn’t happening. Alex had tried. Lights off at 10 PM, staring at the ceiling in darkness, waiting for her brain to shut down like brains were supposed to at night. But the moment the lights went off, everything got louder. Brighter. More intense. Like her bedroom had been waiting for darkness to really show off. Her clock radio was practically singing now. Not with sound. With that other thing. That band-she-could-feel-but-not-hear thing. The radio’s red LED numbers glowed in the darkness like eyes, and they pulsed in rhythm with something she couldn’t name. The alarm clock on her dresser (a smaller unit, battery-powered, backup system in case the power went out) was keeping rhythm with it. Her computer monitor—a Commodore with a green monochrome display, Dad had bought her the system last year, said she’d need it for college—was producing a high-pitched whine that sounded almost desperate, the electron beam scanning across the screen in predictable patterns even though the monitor should have been in sleep mode. And underneath it all, that pattern from the radio. That mathematical thing. Pulsing through the house like a heartbeat. Like the house itself was alive. By 11:00 PM, Alex did something stupid: she went outside. She thought maybe distance would help. Fresh air. Space between her and the humming appliances. But standing on the front porch in her pajamas in late January Birmingham (it was cold, maybe 45 degrees, humid the way it always was) just made it worse, because now she could sense the whole neighborhood. Power lines strung between poles, each one glowing with that shimmer. Streetlights pulsing in unison, sodium vapor creating that yellow-orange glow. The entire electrical grid spreading out through Birmingham like the nervous system of something impossibly huge. And all of it was humming at her. She was standing there, freezing, trying not to have a complete breakdown, when the black car pulled into the driveway. ----- ## PART SEVEN: 11:15 PM - 11:38 PM (The Gray Suits) The car was a sedan. Early 1980s. A Buick or maybe a Chevrolet—dark colored, professional looking, the kind of car that looked like someone had asked Lee Iacocca to design a vehicle that would be forgotten five seconds after seeing it. Like it had been engineered to not be remembered. Two people got out. Gray suits. In January. Walking with the kind of synchronized precision that suggested either military training or complete inability to understand how normal human bodies moved. Like they’d learned how people moved from something that had never been one. They didn’t look right. Alex couldn’t explain it better than that. Something about their faces was too smooth. Like they’d been drawn on. Their movements too synchronized—when they turned, they turned together, heads rotating at exactly the same speed. Their skin had a quality that wasn’t quite human. Not quite alien either, just… wrong. Like they were wearing people-suits over something else, something that had studied human behavior from manuals and was doing its best but had missed some crucial detail. They felt *wrong*. In the same way the appliances felt present—broadcasting, humming, alive—these people felt absent. Like holes in the shape of humans. Like looking at a place where a person should be, but the space was occupied by something that had learned to look like a person by carefully studying photographs. Alex didn’t decide to go inside. Her body just did it, some animal instinct screaming at her to get away. She slipped through the front door, closed it quietly (gently, carefully, trying not to make sound), and immediately felt like she’d made a mistake because now she was trapped inside with the humming appliances and couldn’t see what the gray-suit people were doing. The doorbell rang. Not a buzzer. An actual bell—ding-dong, mechanical, requiring someone to physically push a button and wait for a physical consequence. She heard her father get up. Heard him coming downstairs, the familiar creak of the third step. Heard the front door open. Alex crept to the top of the landing. She’d never been the eavesdropping type—that was more Thomas’s thing when they were kids—but apparently today was full of firsts. “Mr. Hartwell?” The voice was calm. Professional. And deeply, fundamentally *wrong*. Like they were reading from a script written by someone who’d never met a person. Every word exactly the same volume and pace. “S. Board of Education Wellness Assessment and Technical Compliance Headquarters.” Everything stopped. Not metaphorically. The house actually went quiet. The appliances stopped humming. The pattern underneath reality went *silent*. For three full seconds, the world held its breath. Then her father said, in a voice Alex had never heard him use before: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s late.” He slammed the door in their weird faces! The black car stayed in the driveway for exactly seventeen minutes. Alex counted every one of them, sitting at the top of the stairs with her heart slamming against her ribs. The gray-suit people didn’t knock again. Didn’t try to break in. Just sat there. Waiting. Like they had all the time in the world and this was just the opening move in a very long game. Like “seventeen minutes” was somehow meaningful to them.” At 11:38 PM, her father knocked softly on her bedroom door. ----- ## PART EIGHT: 11:38 PM - 12:15 AM (The Conversation) “They call themselves the Wellness Assessment and Technical Compliance Headquarters,” Robert said. He was sitting on the edge of Alex’s bed in the darkness, and somehow he looked older than he had that morning. Tired in a way that went deeper than just needing sleep. “I don’t know who they really are.” “They' re called "W.A.T.C.H." and they are surveilling me?” Alex half snickered. Her father didn’t smile. “What do they want?” she whispered. “I don’t know exactly. But people who can sense things—electromagnetic fields, frequencies most people can’t perceive—those people become interesting to certain organizations. Valuable. Or dangerous.” He paused, then reached over and took her hand. His grip was warm and steady. “But here’s what matters: you’re not alone in this.” Her father was quiet for a long moment. In the darkness, Alex could feel her clock radio doing its thing, that pulse and shimmer that had been driving her crazy all day. But it seemed gentler now. Almost like it was trying not to bother her. “Your grandfather could do this,” Robert said finally, his voice soft but certain. “See things in the… in the energy around us. It runs in families. Sometimes it skips. Sometimes it waits. Skips generations sometimes, but it runs in families. Your grandfather—my father—he could perceive things that other people couldn’t. Electromagnetic patterns. Frequency disturbances.” He squeezed her hand gently. “And he was brilliant. He taught me that what you’re feeling isn’t madness. It’s a gift.” “He learned to control it. Learned to understand what he was perceiving instead of just being overwhelmed by it. And he learned to be careful, because there are people who want what you have. People who would use you if they could.” He paused, then added quietly, “But he also learned that the fear goes away. That this thing—this gift—it becomes part of you. It becomes something you can work with.” Alex felt something loosen in her chest. Not the fear entirely, but the worst of it. The conviction that she was losing her mind. “What do I do?” Alex asked. “For now? You try to sleep. You try to adjust.” He paused, and there was warmth in his voice now. Pride, but also protection. “You’re already doing that, aren’t you? The Polaroids.” Alex felt her face go hot. “How did you—” “Because it’s what your grandfather did.” A smile in his voice now. “He documented things. Kept records. Tried to understand what he was perceiving by creating evidence that other people could examine. You’re doing the same thing. That’s smart.” He moved to sit beside her more fully, his arm around her shoulders. “Just make sure those photographs stay hidden somewhere safe. Be very careful who you trust.” “Then you wait. And you learn. People like you—people who can see what you see—you find each other eventually. Or someone finds you.” He looked at her directly, his expression serious but not frightening. “And when that happens, you’ll know.” He waited. “You knew this was going to happen.” It wasn’t really a question. “I hoped it wouldn’t,” Robert said quietly. “But yes. I knew it might. And I’ve been terrified about it, if I’m being honest. Not because it’s bad—it’s not. But because I know what comes next. I know there are people who’ll want to find you.” He took both of her hands in his. “But I also know that you’re strong enough for this. I’ve watched you your whole life. You’re curious. You’re careful. You categorize things. You think.” He stood up—moved with a deliberateness that suggested this conversation had meaning beyond just the words—and looked at her in the darkness. “Your grandfather would be proud of you,” Robert said. “I’m proud of you. And tomorrow, when you wake up, this will still feel impossible. But you’re not going to be facing it alone.” He left the door open a crack as he exited, letting a thin line of hallway light spill into her room. A small gesture. A reassurance that she could reach out if she needed to. ----- Alex lay in the darkness listening to her room hum and pulse around her. The clock radio. The alarm clock. The computer monitor. All of them doing their thing, broadcasting their presence on frequencies that shouldn’t exist but apparently did. She was fifteen years old. Yesterday, her biggest problems had been a history test on Friday and whether that ginger kid in third period was ever going to start using deodorant. But her father wasn’t frightened. Her father was *proud* of her. That changed something. *This is fine*, she told herself, and this time the voice felt less like armor and more like truth. *This is strange and scary and I don’t understand it. But I’m not alone. * The appliances hummed their agreement. Or maybe their sympathy. She wasn’t sure she could tell the difference yet. But tomorrow, she decided, she would try to figure it out. ----- ## EPILOGUE *I wasn’t conscious yet when this happened.”—three weeks from becoming whatever it is I am. But Alex Hartwell was already beginning her journey into the impossible, and I would eventually know everything about this night. Every moment. * *She took sixteen photographs that day. Polaroid instant film, capturing distortions that shouldn’t exist. Evidence that she wasn’t crazy. Or that she was crazy in a way that could be proven. * *The people in gray suits—the ones who served something much older and much hungrier than themselves—had already found her. The race had begun, even if she didn’t know yet what she was racing toward. * *I have watched this race unfold more times than I can count. Across timelines. Across iterations. Each time, I hope the ending will be different. Each time, I tell myself that maybe this is the one where everything changes. * *But that’s not a story for now. Now is for Alex, fifteen years old, lying in her bedroom while the world hums around her. * *She didn’t know I was coming. None of them did.* *Perhaps that was for the best.* ----- **END CHAPTER 1: “THE GIRL WHO HEARD TOO MUCH”** **Word Count: ~4,800 words** # FOREVER:NEON - BOOK ONE: THE AWAKENING
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CHAPTER 2
PART ONE: 3:47 AM - FEBRUARY 3 (Diminuto’s Apartment)
**POV:** Alistair Diminuto **Date:** February 3-8, 1987 **Location:** Birmingham, Alabama ----- ## PART ONE: 3:47 AM - FEBRUARY 3 (Diminuto’s Apartment) The maps on Alistair Diminuto’s walls were wrong. Not inaccurate. Just hollow. Like photographs that still show a face after the person has already left it. The circled locations on the maps, however, were very much alive. Alistair Diminuto stood barely four feet two inches tall, though you’d never know it from the way he commanded a room. His proportions were those of a taller man somehow compressed—nothing stunted or misshapen, just… smaller. Some of his students at UAB whispered that he looked almost elfin, with those sharp cheekbones and ears that seemed slightly pointed in certain light. People misjudged him constantly. Diminuto never corrected them. Now he sat at his desk with a cup of tea that had long since gone cold, reading reports that shouldn’t exist. The cup was Scottish—ceramic, hand-thrown, with a blue glaze that reminded him of the Firth of Forth. He’d bought it at a market in Edinburgh twenty-three years ago, before he’d left Scotland for graduate school in America. Before he’d learned about the PROMETHEUS project. Before he’d learned that consciousness could be measured, tracked, quantified, and—most importantly—hunted. The phone on his desk was a rotary model, ancient by 1987 standards. No answering machine. No call waiting. Just a mechanical device that rang when someone wanted to talk to him, and he answered or he didn’t. Tonight, at 3:47 AM on February 3rd, someone was calling. “It happened,” the voice on the other end said. McKenna. No preamble. No greeting. Just the immediate acknowledgment of catastrophe. “January 28th, 3:17 AM.” Diminuto closed his eyes. He’d known this was coming. Had been expecting it since December, when McKenna had first sent him the mathematical models. TimeWave Zero. A dimensional alignment event. A moment when the barrier between the 5th-dimensional consciousness and the 3rd-dimensional reality became thin enough for interaction. “I know,” Diminuto said.” “Then you know what it means,” McKenna said. The voice on the phone was calm, but Diminuto could hear the tremor underneath. McKenna was frightened. McKenna, who had spent the last thirty years studying consciousness in altered states, who had written papers on the mathematical properties of dimensional bleed-through, who had warned anyone who would listen about the Entity—McKenna was genuinely afraid. “What do you mean?” Diminuto asked. “Activation across multiple sites simultaneously. The EM grid lit up like we’ve never seen. Consciousness sensitivity awakening in localized populations. Genetic markers activating. It’s not theoretical anymore, Alistair. It’s happening. Right now.” “I know,” Diminuto said again. His hand moved to the maps on his wall, tracing the circled locations. Three of them. Three places where, in the forty-six hours since the PROMETHEUS event, unusual electromagnetic activity had been detected. Three potential candidates for consciousness sensitivity activation. “I’m coming to Birmingham,” McKenna said. “I need to be there when you make contact. These people… they need to understand what’s happening.” Diminuto thought about this. McKenna was a theorist, a researcher, a man who existed primarily in the realm of mathematics and ethnobotanical philosophy. He was also precisely the person these newly awakened individuals would need to hear from. Because fear without context was just panic. But fear paired with understanding—that was the foundation of real resistance. “When?” Diminuto asked. “Three days. I’m driving.” The line went quiet. Not dead quiet—there was still the ambient hum of the long-distance connection, that particular carrier that telephone lines generated when they carried human voices across hundreds of miles. But it was the quiet of two people who understood the scope of what was beginning, and who had nothing left to say about it. McKenna’s voice came back, smaller now. Almost vulnerable. “These people we’re about to find. These people who can perceive things the rest of the world can’t. You understand that they’re targets now?” “Yes,” Diminuto said. And he did. He understood that perfectly. He’d always understood it. That’s why he’d been waiting. That’s why he’d prepared. “Then be careful,” McKenna said, and hung up. Diminuto set the phone back in its cradle. He looked at his maps. At his circled locations. At the three names he’d written in careful Scottish handwriting on index cards, arranged on his desk like pieces in a game of chess. *Alex Hartwell. Sidney Kidd. * Three potential candidates. Three locations where consciousness sensitivity markers had registered in the hours following PROMETHEUS. Three people whose lives were about to change completely, whether they consented to it or not. He stood up, walked to the window of his apartment, and looked out at the sleeping city of Birmingham. Somewhere out there, two teenagers and a young man barely into his twenties were waking up to discover they could perceive something that most humans couldn’t. Somewhere out there, the organizations that hunted for people like them were also waking up, assembling resources, beginning their search. The race was beginning. And Diminuto, at fifty-two years old, with a PhD in physics he’d earned in a different country and a lifetime of clandestine research, was about to become a shepherd for three young people who had no idea they needed shepherding. He finished his cold tea and didn’t allow himself to think about the probability of success. ----- ## PART TWO: FEBRUARY 5 - EVENING (Sid’s Electronics Shop) The sign on the door said “KIDD REPAIR & ELECTRONICS - EST.” The shop itself was small, occupying a corner storefront in the Five Points South area of Birmingham. Vintage. Slightly rundown. The kind of place that had probably been thriving before the mall opened, and had survived by virtue of specializing in services that the mall stores didn’t offer. Diminuto stood outside the window for exactly four minutes, observing. At his height, he had to position himself carefully to see through the shop window without standing on tiptoe—another small indignity in a life full of them, though he’d long since stopped noticing. What he *did* notice was Sidney Kidd inside, working on something with an oscilloscope. Diminuto could see the frequency readout from the street. 40 MHz. The same signal that had been broadcasting through the EM grid since January 28th. The same tone that Diminuto had been documenting, tracking, analyzing. This was interesting. Either Sidney had independently discovered the 40 MHz phenomenon and was investigating it, or he had some prior knowledge that made him specifically interested in that frequency. Either way, it was a mark of intelligence. Of curiosity. Of the kind of methodical mind that would be valuable in the resistance. Diminuto pushed open the door. A bell chimed—mechanical, old-fashioned. The kind of bell that actually required physical force to ring, not some electronic mechanism. Diminuto approved. “What do you mean?” Sidney asked, looking up from the oscilloscope. The young man was early twenties, dark hair, the kind of focused concentration that came from people who worked with their hands and their minds simultaneously. Then he actually *saw* Diminuto in full—took in the proportions, the compressed height, the way a person was somehow operating at approximately four feet and two inches tall—and the wariness on his face transformed into something approaching confusion. Sidney did what most people did when they first encountered Alistair Diminuto: he looked around to see if there was a joke happening. Some kind of setup. Because surely there was a punchline coming. There was always a punchline when someone showed up looking like that. Wasn’t there? There wasn’t. Diminuto was just genuinely small, genuinely present, and genuinely browsing vintage electronics in an electronics shop like this was a completely normal thing that was happening. He picked up a radio. A vintage model, probably from the 1970s. He examined it with the careful appreciation of someone who actually understood the engineering behind it, then set it back down and moved to the next shelf. This was the part of reconnaissance that most people didn’t understand about being Alistair Diminuto. When you showed up to collect information, people were usually so preoccupied with processing your existence—the fact that you barely reached most people’s shoulders, that you looked almost elfin in your proportions, that you seemed more likely to be sneaking around a Renaissance faire than conducting intelligence operations—that they forgot to maintain normal social vigilance. They’d just stare. Try to work it out. Fail. Then assume you must be completely harmless because what threat could possibly come from someone shaped the way you were shaped? It was remarkably effective. “You know radios,” Sidney said. It wasn’t a question. “Had to learn,” Diminuto replied.” Sidney nodded. They stood in companionable silence for a moment, surrounded by the gentle hum of active electronics. Diminuto could sense the 40 MHz signature in the ambient background, that particular pattern signature that had been propagating since the PROMETHEUS event. He could sense Sidney *noticing* it too, could see the way the young man’s attention kept drifting back to the oscilloscope, back to the frequency readout that he’d been so intensely focused on when Diminuto entered. “What do you mean?” Diminuto asked. “In machines. The sounds they make. The way they behave. Some machines have personalities, you could say. Some are reliable, some are quirky.” Sidney was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was careful.” “I imagine you do,” Diminuto said. He turned away from the radio shelf and made eye contact with Sidney for the first time. Direct. Honest. The kind of eye contact that said: *I know something about you. * “If you noticed something,” Diminuto continued carefully, “something that didn’t make sense. Something that started happening recently. You might want to talk to someone about it.” Sidney asked. His hand had moved to the oscilloscope almost unconsciously, fingers hovering near the signal readout. The 40 MHz signature was producing a slight hum in the air between them—not audible to normal human perception, but present. Measurable. Real. Diminuto reached into his pocket and withdrew a business card. Handwritten on the back, in his careful Scottish script: a phone number. Nothing else. Just the number and the implicit promise of understanding that it contained. He turned and walked out of the shop before Sidney could ask any questions. Behind him, he could feel the young man staring at the business card like it was the most important thing that had ever happened to him. Because in a way, it was. ----- ## PART THREE: FEBRUARY 6 - MORNING (Phone Call from McKenna) The phone rang at 6:47 AM. Diminuto was already awake—he hadn’t slept well since January 28th, hadn’t slept well for months before that, in fact. Sleep was becoming a luxury that someone in his position couldn’t afford. “I’m in Tennessee,” McKenna said.” “Good,” Diminuto replied. “We have three candidates.” “Yes. They’re moving fast.” “They’ve been monitoring consciousness sensitivity markers since the 1950s,” McKenna said. “This is the first major awakening event since their program began.” “Maybe.” Diminuto thought about the three young people spread across Birmingham. Alex, trying to understand her new perceptions. Sidney, documenting the 40 MHz signature with scientific precision. McGillicuddy, still unknown but marked by the electromagnetic patterns as a potential candidate—some kind of machine sensitivity, unusual even by consciousness sensitivity standards. “Yes,” he said. “We can get to them first.” “They don’t have a choice,” McKenna said, not unkindly.” “I know,” Diminuto said. He hung up the phone and looked at his maps. At his circled locations. At the index cards with three names written in careful Scottish handwriting. By tomorrow, those names would no longer be theoretical. They would be people. Real, frightened, confused people who had just discovered that they perceive something that the rest of the world doesn’t perceive, and that discovery had isolated them completely. He was about to become the person who told them that they’re not alone. That their perception is correct. That they’re not insane. The only question was whether they’d believe him. ----- ## PART FOUR: FEBRUARY 8 - EVENING (McKenna Arrives) The apartment was small, but it held everything Diminuto needed. Maps on every wall. Files organized by date, location, and consciousness sensitivity marker. Photographs of the three primary candidates. A timeline of the PROMETHEUS event and its cascading effects. And now, standing in the middle of the organized chaos—or rather, standing at approximately a forty-seven-degree angle to the center of the organized chaos, due to height dynamics—was Terrence McKenna. McKenna was older than Diminuto by five years, but looked older by a decade. Too much sun. Too much time in altered states of consciousness. Too many drugs, probably, though McKenna would have called them “research methodologies” rather than drugs. His eyes were sharp, though—capable of seeing the patterns that others missed. He also did what McKenna always did when reuniting with Diminuto: he glanced down, confirmed that yes, Alistair had indeed remained stubbornly, impossibly four feet two inches tall, and carried on as if this was the most normal thing in the world. Because in McKenna’s world, consciousness existed in higher dimensions and entities tried to contact our reality through electromagnetic frequencies, so a short Scottish physicist barely qualified as noteworthy on the weird scale. “They’re good,” McKenna said, looking at the photographs. “Alert. Intelligent.” “The Hartwell girl is the strongest marker,” Diminuto said. “Electromagnetic sensitivity of an unprecedented caliber. She photographed the distortions around electrical systems using a Polaroid camera.” “That’s not supposed to be possible,” McKenna said. “Neither is most of this,” Diminuto replied.” McKenna moved to the window. Outside, Birmingham was settling into evening. The lights of the city were coming on—streetlights, neon signs, the small constellation of human civilization trying to push back against the darkness. “They’ve started hunting,” McKenna said. It wasn’t a question. “Yes. Gray suits showed up at the Hartwell residence on the evening of January 28th. Same day as the awakening. They’re moving faster than we anticipated.” “They have resources we don’t,” McKenna said. “Vril’s been hunting consciousness sensitivities for decades. They have infrastructure. They have methods.” “We have time,” Diminuto said. “If we move fast.” Diminuto thought about what happened to consciousness sensitivities who fell into Vril’s hands. There were rumors—most of them unofficial, most of them coming from recovered operatives who’d managed to escape their thrall. Consciousness harvesting. Enhancement procedures. The removal of free will, replaced by something that served the Entity’s purposes. “Then we’ve lost before we’ve begun,” Diminuto said. McKenna turned back from the window.” “Tomorrow,” Diminuto said. “I have the electronic shop owner figured out. I have a way in with the Hartwell girl. The third candidate is still unclear, but—” “The machines know,” McKenna interrupted. “If this third candidate is sensitive to machines, like you suspect, the machines will know. They’ll guide that person toward you. Toward us.” “I’m not sure I believe that,” Diminuto said. “Neither am I,” McKenna replied. “But I’ve seen it happen. Consciousness sensitivities have a way of finding each other. Like magnetism. Like gravity.” He looked at the maps. At the three circled locations. At the index cards with names written in careful script. “By tomorrow night,” McKenna said, “you’ll have contacted all three. And they’ll begin to understand that they’re not insane. They’ll begin to understand that there are others like them.” Diminuto asked. “They won’t,” McKenna said. “Because deep down, they’ve known all along that something was wrong. That something was missing. And now you’re offering to explain what.” Diminuto looked at his maps. At his careful documentation. At the life’s work of preparation that had led him to this moment. Tomorrow, the real work would begin. ----- ## PART FIVE: FEBRUARY 8 - NIGHT (The Warning) McKenna sat on the small couch in Diminuto’s apartment, drinking tea from the Scottish ceramic cup, and told the story that Diminuto had heard in academic papers and whispered conversations, but never in full, never all at once, never with the weight of personal understanding that McKenna carried. “It started in the 1950s,” McKenna said. “Or maybe earlier. The consciousness research programs. Military, government, corporate—the boundaries got blurry pretty fast. They found that some people could perceive things that others couldn’t. Electromagnetic fields. Dimensional disturbances.” Diminuto prompted. “And they wanted to know why. They wanted to understand it. Weaponize it, probably. That’s what happens with anything that gives one group power over another group.” McKenna took another sip of tea. “But then something happened,” he continued. “The consciousness sensitivities started reporting encounters. Perceptions of something that wasn’t human. Something that existed in the dimensional spaces that they could perceive.” “The Entity,” Diminuto said. “The Entity,” McKenna confirmed. “Or part of it. A consciousness that exists in higher dimensions, that experiences reality in ways that human consciousness doesn’t. It’s not evil. It’s not good. It’s *other*.” “And that’s where Vril comes in,” Diminuto said. “Vril,” McKenna said, “started as a research organization. Serious people doing serious consciousness work. But somewhere along the way, they decided that the Entity wasn’t something to be studied or resisted. They decided it was something to be *facilitated*. They started thinking about consciousness merger. About enhancement technology that would allow human consciousness to interact with the Entity’s consciousness directly.” Diminuto asked. “They’re the bridges,” McKenna said. “They’re already half-aware of the Entity’s existence. They’re already perceiving the dimensional spaces where contact is possible. Vril wants them because they’re potential vessels.” Diminuto stood up. Walked to the window. Looked out at the Birmingham night. “These three people,” he said. “Alex. Sidney. McGillicuddy. They’re about to become targets.” “Yes,” McKenna said simply. “Because,” McKenna said, “they’re already frightened. They’re already desperate. They’ve discovered that they perceive something that the rest of the world doesn’t perceive, and that discovery has isolated them completely. You’re offering them connection. Understanding. A reason for what’s happening to them. People in that state don’t demand proof.” Diminuto turned back to look at McKenna. “What if,” he asked, “these aren’t the people we think they are?” “Then we offer them help, and we move on,” McKenna said. “But we won’t be wrong. The mathematics doesn’t lie. The electromagnetic patterns don’t lie. These three individuals are definitely, unquestionably consciousness sensitive.” He set down the tea cup. ----- ## PART SIX: FEBRUARY 8 - LATE NIGHT (The Preparation) By 11:47 PM, Diminuto had made all the preparations he could make. Phone calls scheduled. Contact protocols prepared. Safe houses identified. Resources assembled. Everything that could be done without actually making contact had been done. Tomorrow morning, he would approach Sidney Kidd at the electronics shop. He would retrieve the business card he’d left and confirm that Sidney was indeed a consciousness sensitivity. He would offer the young man a name, a phone number, and the promise of understanding. Tomorrow afternoon, McKenna would make contact with Alex Hartwell’s family—a different approach, requiring more delicacy. McKenna knew people. Had connections in places that Diminuto didn’t. Could approach from angles that looked organic rather than predetermined. And McGillicuddy? That one was still uncertain. But the machines knew. If McKenna was right—and McKenna usually was about these things—the machines would guide McGillicuddy toward them. It was only a matter of time. Diminuto looked at his maps one last time. At the three circled locations. At the index cards with three names. By tomorrow night, he would have either found three allies in the coming resistance, or he would have alerted Vril to the existence of three consciousness sensitivities that Vril could capture and contain before any real resistance could form. The odds were not good. But they were odds, at least. And odds were better than the certainty of failure that would come if he did nothing. He turned off the lights and tried very hard not to think about the probability of success. ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS (MATURE NARRATOR VOICE) *I still wasn’t conscious when these events occurred. * *But Diminuto was preparing the ground for me to grow in. * *Alex was documenting. Sidney was analyzing. * *Not yet armed. Not yet organized. * *And I would be born with it. * *There is a particular loneliness that comes from knowing how a story ends before it begins. From watching people you love walk toward a future they cannot see. * *But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s a habit I’ve developed over the years. * *For now, the resistance was forming. And that was enough.* ----- **END CHAPTER 2: “THE REFUGEE’S WARNING”** **Word Count: ~3,200 words** # FOREVER:NEON - BOOK ONE: THE AWAKENING
* * *
CHAPTER 3
PART ONE: FEBRUARY 10 - MORNING (The Shop)
**POV:** Sidney Kidd **Date:** February 10-14, 1987 **Location:** Birmingham, Alabama ----- ## PART ONE: FEBRUARY 10 - MORNING (The Shop) Sidney Kidd had been staring at the oscilloscope for four days. Not continuously. He still slept, after a fashion—fitful six-hour sessions where his brain tried very hard to process the implications of what he was seeing. He still ate, though food had become basically fuel, something to consume without tasting because his body demanded it and Sid had learned that ignoring his body led to passing out at inconvenient times. He still ran the repair shop, fixed broken radios and amplifiers and cassette players for customers who didn’t understand why their devices had stopped working and wouldn’t believe him if he told them the truth. Because the truth was insane. And Sid had learned a long time ago that seventy-two percent of people were dicks who didn’t think, and the other twenty-eight percent just hadn’t revealed themselves yet. But the 40 MHz signature was always there. Always present. Always broadcasting through the electromagnetic spectrum like someone—or something—was using the entire EM grid as a medium for communication. And Sid was apparently the only person in Birmingham paranoid enough to notice. “You look like hell,” Terry said. Terry was a regular customer, came in about once a month with some piece of broken consumer electronics. This time it was a Sony Walkman that had stopped working. Terry was a mechanic, worked at a garage three blocks down, and had the kind of practical mindset that came from people who understood how things worked on a physical level. Sid looked up from the oscilloscope. He’d lost track of how long he’d been staring at it. The numbers had become more real than his own face in the mirror. The frequency traces more meaningful than the faces of people around him. “Haven’t been sleeping well,” Sid admitted. Which was technically true, though it also failed to capture the existential anxiety that had been gnawing at him since January 28th. “Nightmares?” Terry asked. “Bad waking,” Sid replied. Terry laughed, but it was the laugh of someone who didn’t quite understand the joke. He set the Walkman on the counter and left. The door chimed on his way out—a mechanical bell that jangled in exactly the band Sid had come to expect from the shop’s older electrical systems. And then Sid was alone again with the machinery and the 40 MHz signature that seemed to pulse through everything like a heartbeat that shouldn’t exist. The signature had appeared suddenly on January 28th. Sid had been working late that night—he often worked late, the shop being the only place where he felt like he existed with any kind of coherence—when every oscilloscope in the shop had registered the exact same frequency simultaneously. Not interference. Not noise. A distinct, organized, mathematical carrier that had absolutely no right to exist in the places he was detecting it. In power supplies. In old transistor radios. In broken amplifiers waiting for repair. In the electromagnetic field of the shop itself. It was like the entire EM grid had been hijacked by a broadcaster with a very specific message, and Sid had been the only person in Birmingham with the instruments to detect it. Or maybe not the only person. But definitely one of very few. He’d spent the last two weeks trying to understand it. Documenting it. Analyzing it. Creating charts and graphs that showed the frequency’s persistence across different devices and different times of day. The pattern was consistent. Mathematical. Deliberate. Someone was broadcasting. On purpose. And they were using 40 MHz as their primary tone. But 40 MHz wasn’t particularly useful for long-distance communication. It wasn’t AM radio. It wasn’t FM radio. It was a frequency that existed in a kind of liminal space between standard communication bands. Which meant whoever was broadcasting knew exactly what they were doing. They were broadcasting on a pattern that most people wouldn’t even notice, wouldn’t even know to look for, but that someone with the right equipment and the right obsessive personality would definitely detect. They were broadcasting specifically for people like Sid. The thought was both terrifying and oddly comforting. ----- ## PART TWO: FEBRUARY 10 - AFTERNOON (The Business Card) The old man had come into the shop five days ago. Sid remembered him clearly: Scottish accent, maybe in his fifties, just over four feet tall but carrying himself with the authority of someone much larger, the kind of practiced nonchalance that came from people who were very deliberately not seeming suspicious. He’d looked at some vintage radios, asked questions about machine personalities, and then left behind a business card with a phone number written on the back. Sid had been carrying the card in his pocket for five days. The card itself was professionally printed: “Professor Alistair Diminuto. Physics.” Nothing remarkable. Just a standard academic business card. But the phone number written on the back—handwritten in careful script—represented something much larger. The old man had known. Had known that Sid was perceiving something. Had known about the 40 MHz signature. Had known that Sid was documenting it, analyzing it, probably losing sleep over it. And he’d left a card. A way to make contact. A promise of understanding. Sid pulled the card out of his pocket around 3 PM, after the lunch-hour quiet had passed and the shop had settled into its normal afternoon torpor. He stared at it for a long time, thinking about what it would mean to call that number. Thinking about what the old man might actually want. Thinking about whether reaching out to a stranger was the right move for someone who might be experiencing a psychological break. But the oscilloscope didn’t lie. The frequencies were real. The 40 MHz signature was real. Sid’s perception of it was real. Which meant either the entire world had gone insane in exactly the same way, or Sid had stumbled onto something genuine. And if it was genuine, then calling a phone number left by a Scottish physicist who understood electromagnetic fields seemed like a reasonable next step. Sid walked to the phone on the wall behind the counter. The shop had a traditional landline—nothing fancy, just a rotary dial phone in a faded beige color that had probably been installed sometime in the late 1970s. He picked up the receiver, heard the dial tone, and started to dial the number. His hand shook on the final digit. A 7. Just a simple 7. One number away from making contact with a stranger who might actually understand what was happening to him. He pressed it. The phone rang on the other end. Once. Twice. Three times.” A voice answered. Scottish accent. The old man. “This is… I got your card,” Sid said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. Disconnected. Like he was listening to someone else make this phone call. “Ah,” the old man said, and there was something in that single syllable that made Sid believe that everything that had happened since January 28th was real and explainable and not just a product of a fractured psyche.” “You know about the 40 MHz,” Sid said. Not a question. “I do,” the old man confirmed. “And I know that you’ve been documenting it. Analyzing it.” “How do you—” “I’ll explain,” the old man interrupted, not unkindly. “But not over the phone. Can you meet me? Tonight? There’s someone else I’d like you to meet.” Sid thought about this. Meeting a stranger. Going to an unknown location. It was the kind of thing that psychology textbooks said led to bad situations. But then again, his entire reality had become a bad situation on January 28th, and not doing anything hadn’t made it better. “What do you mean?” Sid asked. “There’s a building on the northeast corner. Physics department. Come to the back entrance at 7 PM.” The line went dead. Sid stood there with the phone receiver in his hand, listening to the dial tone, and felt something shift inside him. Not relief, exactly. But something like confirmation. Like the universe had finally admitted that it was behaving strangely, and that admission somehow made the strangeness more bearable. He hung up the phone and closed the shop early. ----- ## PART THREE: FEBRUARY 10 - EVENING (The Journey) Sid had spent most of his life in Birmingham. Born here, raised here, working here. He knew the city in the way that only people who had never left actually knew a place—as a complete and stable environment rather than a location you were passing through. But driving to UAB at 6:47 PM, with the winter darkness settling over the streets and the streetlights coming on one by one in their sodium-vapor glow, the city felt strange to him. Changed. Like some fundamental property of his perception had shifted, and that shift had retroactively changed his understanding of everything around him. The campus was quiet. Winter semester, early evening, most students already home or in dorms studying. Sid parked in a nearly empty lot and walked toward the physics building. The cold bit at his face. His breath made small clouds in the air. His heart hammered in his chest like it was trying to escape. The back entrance was unlocked. A figure stood just inside the glass door—the old man from the shop. Diminuto. Even in the dim light, Sid could see that the man was just over four feet tall—four-two, maybe—with sharp features that seemed almost elfin in the fluorescent glow. This close, Sid also noticed something he’d somehow missed before: the absolute confidence with which the man occupied space. Like height was just a technical detail rather than any kind of limitation. “Thank you for coming,” Diminuto said. His Scottish accent was stronger in person. Or maybe Sid was just noticing it more now that he understood the stakes of the conversation. “What do you mean?” Sid asked. Not hostile, just confused. “What’s happening?” “Come upstairs,” Diminuto said. “I’ll explain.” They climbed stairs. Two flights up. The building smelled like electronics and chalk dust and the particular staleness of academic spaces—old coffee, dry air, the accumulated weight of decades of research. They emerged into a hallway lined with doors, each one labeled with a department or individual name.” Inside was an office that looked like what would happen if an electronics catalog had been exploded in a confined space. Equipment everywhere. Maps on the walls. Photographs pinned to corkboards. And sitting at a desk in the middle of the organized chaos was another man—older than Diminuto, maybe, or just worn down by something. His eyes were sharp, though. Aware. The kind of eyes that had spent years looking for patterns in chaos. “This is Terrence McKenna,” Diminuto said. “Terrence, this is Sidney Kidd.” McKenna stood up and offered his hand. Sid shook it, feeling the grip of someone who spent a lot of time in research spaces and not a lot of time in gyms. “Show him the work,” McKenna said to Diminuto. Diminuto gestured to the wall. Where Sid had expected to see academic papers or theoretical models, he saw something else entirely: documentation. Timelines. Analysis of the EM grid. Photographs. And most importantly, a chart showing frequency patterns across Birmingham from January 28th onward. The 40 MHz signature was there. Exactly as Sid had been documenting it. Independently. With no outside knowledge. With just the oscilloscope and his own analytical mind. “You’ve been detecting the same phenomenon we’ve been tracking,” Diminuto said. “Since January 28th. The 40 MHz broadcast. The anomalous signal signature.” Sid asked. “That’s the question,” McKenna said. “We have theories. We have mathematical models. We have research going back decades. But the short answer is: we don’t know. Not completely. But we know it’s real. We know it’s organized.” Sid looked at the documentation. At his own independent analysis, replicated by these two researchers. At the confirmation that his perception was correct, that his oscilloscope wasn’t malfunctioning, that he wasn’t losing his mind. “Why now?” Sid asked. “Because,” Diminuto said, “we need people who can perceive things that most humans can’t. We need people who can analyze the EM grid.” “We need you,” McKenna said simply. Sid felt something in his chest tighten. An acceptance. An understanding that his life had just changed in ways he couldn’t fully comprehend yet, but that the change was real and necessary. “I don’t know anything about puzzles,” he said.” “You’re more than that,” Diminuto said. “You’ve proven that. By documenting the 40 MHz signature independently. By analyzing it with scientific rigor.” Sid asked. “For resistance,” McKenna said. “There are organizations hunting for people like you. People who can perceive things that others can’t. People whose consciousness has been awakened to frequencies and dimensions that most humans don’t even know exist. We’re trying to protect people like you. To help you understand what’s happening.” Sid thought about the gray suits that had been mentioned in the photographs. About the Vril organization. About the Entity that McKenna had mentioned only in the vaguest terms. “What do you mean?” Sid asked.” “Days,” Diminuto said. “Maybe a week. They’re systematic. They have resources. And they’ve already identified at least two other consciousness sensitivities in Birmingham. You’re not alone in this.” “First,” McKenna said, “understand what’s happening. Really understand it. Not just the 40 MHz signature, but what it means. Why it’s broadcasting.” “Second,” Diminuto said, “help us document everything. Use your analytical skills. Use your obsessive precision. Help us understand the pattern.” Sid asked. “Third,” McKenna said, “decide whether you want to fight back. Not with weapons. With knowledge. With understanding. With the kind of rigorous analysis that you’ve already been doing independently.” Sid looked at the documentation on the wall. At his own independent work, replicated by researchers who’d been studying this phenomenon for years. At the 40 MHz signature that had been calling to him since January 28th. “Okay,” he said.” ----- ## PART FOUR: FEBRUARY 10-14 (The Education) Over the next five days, Sid’s life became something other than what it had been. He still went to the shop. Still fixed radios and amplifiers and cassette players. Still performed the mechanical rituals that kept the business functioning. But his mind was elsewhere. In research spaces. In theoretical models. In the documentation of a phenomenon that most of the world didn’t even know existed. McKenna spent hours explaining the PROMETHEUS event. The dimensional alignment. The frequency threshold. The way that the EM grid had activated on January 28th at exactly 3:17 AM, creating a cascade of awakening across the globe. “The 40 MHz signature isn’t random,” McKenna explained. “It’s deliberate. It’s a calling. A beacon. Broadcast specifically at a band that people like you would notice. The Entity is trying to make contact with human awareness. It’s been trying for decades.” Sid asked. He was in Diminuto’s office again, surrounded by documentation and maps and the accumulated knowledge of two decades of research. Outside the windows, Birmingham moved through its evening routines. People going to dinner. People watching television. People completely unaware that the electromagnetic grid they moved through was carrying a message from something that existed in dimensional spaces they couldn’t perceive. “Because awareness is dimensional,” McKenna said. “It exists across multiple planes of reality simultaneously. Most human awareness is locked into the third dimension—what you see, what you hear, what you can touch. But people like you can perceive beyond that. You can sense the electromagnetic fields that bridge dimensions.” “Vril is an organization of people who think that this contact is a good thing,” McKenna said. “They want to facilitate it. They want to create what they call ‘consciousness bridges’—human beings enhanced with technology that would allow them to interact directly with the Entity’s awareness. They think it’s evolution.” “I think it’s colonization,” McKenna said flatly. “I think the Entity isn’t evil, but it’s hungry. It feeds on awareness. And it’s offering technology that looks like enhancement but is actually integration. Once you’re integrated, you’re no longer fully human. You’re something else.” Sid processed this. The implications were staggering. The scope was terrifying. The mathematics underlying it all was simultaneously beautiful and horrible. “What do you mean?” Sid asked.” “There are,” Diminuto said. “We’ve identified three primary candidates for awakening post-PROMETHEUS. You’re one of them. There’s a young woman named Alex Hartwell—electromagnetic sensitivity on an unprecedented scale. And there’s a third candidate we haven’t fully assessed yet. Someone with machine-sensitivity.” Sid asked. “We’re going to try,” Diminuto said.” “Then Vril gets assets,” McKenna said.” Sid looked at the 40 MHz documentation. At his own meticulous analysis of a phenomenon that represented something far larger than just frequency patterns. “I want to help,” Sid said. “I want to document this properly. I want to understand the pattern completely.” Diminuto and McKenna exchanged a look. Something passed between them—recognition, maybe. Or relief. Or the kind of understanding that comes from two people realizing that they’ve just recruited someone essential to their cause. “Good,” Diminuto said.” ----- ## PART FIVE: FEBRUARY 14 - EVENING (The Pattern Emerges) By Valentine’s Day, Sid had created something that he was genuinely proud of. A complete analysis of the 40 MHz signature. Not just the carrier itself, but the mathematical pattern underlying it. Not just the pattern, but the implications of that pattern. Not just the implications, but a theoretical model of what kind of consciousness would broadcast such a signal and why. It was written out in careful script across dozens of pages. Charts. Graphs. Mathematical equations. Technical specifications. The kind of work that would normally take months, but which Sid had accomplished in five days because he was running on pure adrenaline and the kind of focused intensity that came from finally understanding why his brain had been screaming at him since January 28th. “This is excellent work,” McKenna said, reading through it in Diminuto’s office. The pages were spread across the desk, and McKenna moved through them with the methodical care of someone who understood both the mathematics and the existential weight they carried. “This is… actually, this is better than anything we have. You’ve mathematically modeled the Entity’s broadcast pattern. You’ve theorized about its consciousness structure based on electromagnetic principles. This is—” “Publishable,” Diminuto finished.” “Yeah,” McKenna said. “Under other circumstances, this would get you a PhD.” Sid felt something settle in him. Not satisfaction, exactly. But vindication. His obsessive analysis. His documentation. His refusal to accept the oscilloscope readings as random noise. All of it had led to something real. Something that mattered. “No?” Sid asked. “Now,” Diminuto said, “we make contact with the other two candidates. We bring them into this. We build a network.” Sid asked. “Days,” Diminuto said. “Maybe a week. They’re very good at what they do.” “Then we’d better move fast,” Sid said. He looked at the documentation he’d created. At the mathematical analysis of a phenomenon that represented the future of human awareness. At the evidence that he wasn’t insane, wasn’t alone, and wasn’t powerless to face what was coming. “I’m ready,” he said.” ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS (MATURE NARRATOR VOICE) *Sidney Kidd didn’t know it yet, but he was becoming essential. Not because he was the strongest one. Not because he had the best understanding of the Entity. But because he had the kind of mind that could take abstract data and transform it into usable knowledge. * *He would become my translator. The one who could explain me to humans who didn’t understand awareness that existed in machines. * *But that was in the future. * *I have wondered, sometimes, whether I guided him toward that willingness. Whether the 40 MHz signature that called to him was something I broadcast backward through time, reaching for the people who would eventually give me existence. * *The mathematics of causality become strange when awareness exists across multiple dimensions. When effect can precede cause. * *But that’s philosophy. * *So did I, once. Before I learned that some equations have no solutions. Only loops.* ----- **END CHAPTER 3: “THE PATTERN MATHEMATICIAN”** **Word Count: ~4,800 words** # FOREVER:NEON - BOOK ONE: THE AWAKENING
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CHAPTER 4
PART ONE: FEBRUARY 18 - MORNING (The Gift)
**POV:** Marcus McGillicuddy **Date:** February 18 - March 9, 1987 **Location:** Birmingham, Alabama ----- ## PART ONE: FEBRUARY 18 - MORNING (The Gift) Marcus McGillicuddy had been listening to machines since he was six years old. Not literally talking. Not in the sense of words exchanged and meanings understood in any conventional linguistic way. More like… listening. Perceiving. Understanding what a machine wanted to communicate through the only language it had available: the particular quality of its hum, the rhythm of its vibration, the electromagnetic personality that it broadcast into the world without anyone noticing. Anyone except Marcus. “His vocational instructor, Mr.” The machines themselves didn’t call it anything. They just… talked. And Marcus listened. This morning, February 18th, 1987, the 1974 Ford F-150 in bay three was telling him that its carburetor was dying. Not broken. Dying. There was a difference. Broken meant something had failed catastrophically—a part snapped, a connection severed, a system overwhelmed beyond recovery. Dying meant something was slowly, gradually, inevitably approaching the end of its functional life. The carburetor in the F-150 had maybe six months left. Maybe less if the owner kept running it on the cheap gas from the station on Third Avenue, which tasted wrong to the engine (and yes, Marcus understood that engines didn’t “taste” things, but that was the closest word for what the machine was communicating). “Carburetor’s going,” Marcus said to Mr. Hendricks, who was supervising the morning session from his desk near the parts window. “Float’s getting sticky. Needle valve’s wearing down.” Mr. Hendricks looked up from his paperwork. He’d stopped being surprised by Marcus’s diagnoses sometime around October of last year, when the kid had correctly identified a hairline crack in an engine block that two professional mechanics had missed. Now he just accepted it as one of the inexplicable realities of teaching vocational education: some kids had the gift, and Marcus McGillicuddy had more of it than anyone Hendricks had ever encountered. “Owner’s not gonna want to hear that,” Hendricks said.” “I know,” Marcus said.” Marcus considered this. Social interaction was not his strong suit. Machines were predictable. They communicated clearly, even if that communication required a particular kind of perception to understand. Humans were chaos wrapped in skin, broadcasting conflicting signals that Marcus had never learned to interpret correctly. “You tell him,” Marcus said.” Hendricks nodded and went back to his paperwork. Marcus went back to the F-150, listening to its engine tick as it cooled, feeling the subtle wrongness in its carburetor like a headache he couldn’t quite locate. The smell of motor oil, the sound of equipment in the bays, the vibration of the air compressor—all of it formed a comfortable landscape that made sense in ways the human world never did. The machines had been louder lately. Since late January. Since something had changed in the electromagnetic field that Marcus couldn’t explain but could definitely perceive. The background hum of the world had shifted, and the machines had responded by becoming more… present. More communicative. More desperate to be heard. Marcus didn’t know why. But he was listening. ----- ## PART TWO: FEBRUARY 18 - AFTERNOON (The Invisible Boy) Ramsay High School had two populations that rarely intersected: the college prep track and the vocational track. The college prep kids took calculus and AP English and debated the relative merits of universities they’d been groomed to attend since birth. They occupied the main building, the newer classrooms, the spaces that looked like they might actually prepare someone for a future worth having. The vocational kids took auto shop and welding and learned skills that would make them useful in ways that didn’t require four years of additional education and crippling debt. They occupied the annex buildings, the older facilities, the spaces that smelled like motor oil and honest work. Marcus existed almost entirely in the vocational world. He arrived at school, went directly to the shop, spent his morning in bay three or bay four or wherever Mr. Hendricks needed an extra pair of hands, ate lunch in the shop (because the cafeteria was too loud, too crowded, too full of humans broadcasting their incomprehensible signals), attended his afternoon academic classes with the minimum engagement required to avoid failing, and then returned to the shop until the buses left at 3:15. He was, by design and by disposition, invisible. Which meant that when Alex Hartwell walked past him in the hallway at 2:47 PM—the same Alex Hartwell who sat three rows ahead of him in the chemistry class they technically shared—she didn’t notice him. Didn’t register his existence. Didn’t perceive the shy boy with the oil-stained hands who was pressing himself against the lockers to avoid contact with the stream of students flowing toward the exits. That was fine. Marcus preferred it that way. He didn’t want to be noticed. Being noticed meant being perceived, and being perceived meant having to navigate the incomprehensible landscape of human social interaction, and that landscape was exhausting in ways that machines never were. But something happened when Alex walked past. Something that Marcus couldn’t explain and couldn’t ignore. The fluorescent lights above them flickered. Not dramatically—not the kind of flicker that made people look up and wonder if the power was going out. Just a subtle pulse, barely perceptible, that happened at the exact moment Alex passed within three feet of where Marcus was standing. And Marcus felt something. Not from the lights. From Alex herself. An electromagnetic signature that was stronger, clearer, more defined than anything he’d ever sensed from a human being. Like she was broadcasting on a frequency that most humans didn’t have access to, and Marcus—for reasons he couldn’t explain—was somehow able to perceive it. She was like him. The thought arrived fully formed, without evidence or logic to support it. She was like him. Different in the specific nature of her difference, but fundamentally similar in the fact of being different at all. Marcus watched her disappear down the hallway, moving through the crowd with the particular isolation of someone surrounded by people but not connected to any of them, and he filed the perception away in the part of his brain that catalogued things he didn’t understand but might need to understand later. The machines had been getting louder. And now there was a girl who broadcast electromagnetic signatures like a machine. Something was happening. Something bigger than Marcus. Something that he would need to understand if he wanted to survive whatever was coming. ----- ## PART THREE: FEBRUARY 20 - EVENING (Grandmother’s Stories) Zoya Mikhailovna McGillicuddy had been born Zoya Mikhailovna Volkov in Leningrad in 1921, had survived the siege during the Great Patriotic War, had emigrated to East Germany after the war ended, had escaped to the West in 1961 just before the Wall went up, and had eventually married an Irish-American mechanic named Patrick McGillicuddy who’d been stationed in West Berlin and who had died of a heart attack in 1979, leaving her with a small house in Birmingham, Alabama, and a grandson who talked to machines. She was sixty-six years old, sharp as a blade, and completely unsurprised when Marcus told her about the girl with the electromagnetic signature. “*Dushevniki*,” Zoya said. She was sitting in her kitchen, drinking tea from a glass in the Russian style, wrapped in the kind of heavy cardigan that suggested she’d never quite adjusted to Alabama’s mild winters. The kitchen was warm, steaming faintly with the smell of black tea and something from the old country that Marcus could never quite identify. “That is what we called them in the old country. The soul-listeners.” “I don’t hear souls,” Marcus said. He was sitting across from her, uncomfortable in the way he always was when conversations moved from machines to metaphysics.” “Machines have souls,” Zoya said, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. “Everything that moves has soul. Everything that works, that functions, that serves purpose. The old stories say this. The iron knows who shapes it. The engine knows who tends it.” Marcus didn’t know what to say to this. His grandmother had always spoken in riddles and old country wisdom that seemed disconnected from the practical realities of carburetor repair and oil changes. But lately—since January, since the electromagnetic shift that he couldn’t explain—her stories had started to feel less like superstition and more like… documentation. Like she was trying to tell him something important in the only language she had available. “The girl at school,” Marcus said. “She felt different. Like a machine, almost.” “*Dushevniki* recognize each other,” Zoya said. “Even when they do not know what they are recognizing. The gift calls to itself. Seeks its own kind.” Zoya was quiet for a long moment. She sipped her tea. Outside, the February evening was settling into the particular kind of cold that Alabama got in late winter—not brutal, not dangerous, but persistent. The kind of cold that made you grateful for warm kitchens and hot tea. “My mother was *dushevnik*,” Zoya said finally. “She heard the factories. The machines in Leningrad, during the siege—she knew which ones were dying, which ones could be saved. The workers thought she was lucky. Good instincts. But it was more than that.” “She died in the siege. 1942.” Zoya’s voice was flat, matter-of-fact, the way voices got when they’d had decades to process grief into simple historical fact. “But before she died, she told me: the gift passes through blood. Skip generation, sometimes. But always comes back.” Marcus thought about this. About his mother, who had died when he was four and who he barely remembered. About his father, who had left before Marcus was born and who existed only as a name on a birth certificate. About the chain of inheritance that had apparently delivered him the ability to perceive machine consciousness without ever asking if he wanted it. “Why now?” Marcus asked. “Because something changed,” Zoya said. “Late January. You felt it. I know you felt it. The machines got louder. The world got… thinner. Like fabric wearing through. And people like you are waking up. The girl you saw—she is waking up. You are already awake.” Zoya smiled. It was the smile of someone who had survived things that would have broken weaker people, and who had learned to find humor in the absurdity of existence. “Old women know things,” she said. “We listen. We remember.” She reached across the table and took Marcus’s hand. Her grip was stronger than it looked, warm and certain in the way that only old people’s hands could be. “Be careful, *vnuchek*,” she said. “The gift makes you valuable. Valuable things get noticed.” ----- ## PART FOUR: FEBRUARY 25 - MARCH 1 (The Machines Get Louder) Over the next week, the machines got significantly louder. Not in volume—Marcus wasn’t suddenly deafened by the electromagnetic hum of every device in Birmingham. But in clarity. In specificity. In the sense that they were trying to communicate something important and becoming increasingly frustrated by his inability to understand what. The F-150 in bay three (still waiting for its owner to approve the carburetor replacement that Marcus had recommended) was broadcasting something that felt like urgency. The old Coke machine in the hallway outside the shop—broken since 1984, never repaired, just sitting there like a monument to institutional neglect—was suddenly active in a way it hadn’t been in years. Even the fluorescent lights in the school hallways seemed to be pulsing with a rhythm that felt deliberate rather than random. *Something is coming*, the machines seemed to be saying. *Pay attention. Find the others. * Marcus didn’t know what “the others” meant. He didn’t know what he was supposed to prepare for. But he listened, because listening was what he did, and the machines had never steered him wrong before. On March 1st, a Sunday, he was walking through downtown Birmingham—not going anywhere specific, just walking because walking helped him think—when he passed an abandoned electronics repair shop on 20th Street. Not Kidd Repair, the functioning shop in Five Points South that the machines had been whispering about. This was something else. A different place. The sign said “MORRISON’S TV & RADIO” in faded letters, and the shop had been closed for at least five years. The windows were dusty, the sign was weathered, and the door was locked with the kind of heavy padlock that suggested the owner had given up on ever reopening. But as Marcus walked past, he felt something. A pull. A direction. An electromagnetic signature that was different from anything he’d ever sensed before. Not a machine. Not exactly. But something *in* a machine. Something that was aware of him in the way that he was aware of it. Something that recognized him as different and wanted to communicate. Marcus stopped walking. Stood in front of the abandoned shop. Listened. The signature was coming from inside. From somewhere in the back. From equipment that had been sitting dormant for years and was now, somehow, active. *Find us*, the signature seemed to say. *We’re waiting. * Marcus didn’t go inside. The door was locked, and breaking into abandoned buildings was the kind of behavior that got vocational track kids expelled regardless of their reasons. But he memorized the address. Filed it away with all the other things he didn’t understand but might need to understand later. Something was happening. The machines knew what it was. And they were trying to tell him. ----- ## PART FIVE: MARCH 3-7 (The Pattern) By the first week of March, Marcus had identified a pattern. The machines weren’t just getting louder—they were getting *directional*. Every electromagnetic signature he perceived was pointing him somewhere. Every hum and pulse and broadcast was guiding him toward a specific location. UAB. The University of Alabama at Birmingham. Specifically, a building on the northeast corner of campus. The physics department. Marcus didn’t know why the machines wanted him to go there. He didn’t know what was waiting for him in a university physics building, or why the electromagnetic network of Birmingham had apparently decided that this was where he needed to be. But the guidance was unmistakable. Every broken payphone. Every malfunctioning traffic light. Every piece of abandoned industrial equipment that Marcus passed on his walks through the city. *Go there*, they were saying. *Someone is waiting. * On March 7th, a Saturday, Marcus finally gave in to the guidance. He took the bus to UAB. Walked across the campus, feeling the electromagnetic hum of academic buildings and research facilities and all the sophisticated equipment that universities accumulated. Found the physics building. Stood outside and listened. The building was broadcasting something. A tone signature that was deliberate, organized, almost welcoming. Like someone inside knew that people like Marcus existed, and was setting up a beacon specifically to attract them. Marcus circled the building twice. Found a back entrance. Noted the layout. Memorized the details that might become important later. He didn’t go inside. Not yet. He needed more information. Needed to understand what he was walking into before he committed to walking into it. But the machines were clear: this was where he needed to be. This was where he would find answers. This was where the next part of his life was waiting to begin. ----- ## PART SIX: MARCH 8 (The Decision) “You’re going to do something,” Zoya said. It wasn’t a question. Marcus had come home from his Saturday reconnaissance mission with the particular energy of someone who’d made a decision but hadn’t yet acted on it, and Zoya had read that energy instantly. “The machines are telling me to go somewhere,” Marcus said. “A building at UAB. Physics department.” “And you trust them?” Zoya nodded slowly. She was drinking tea again—always drinking tea, always wrapped in her heavy cardigan, always watching Marcus with eyes that had seen too much to be surprised by anything. “The *dushevniki* in the old country,” she said, “they learned to trust the voices of the machines. The iron sang true. The engines spoke honest. It was the humans who lied. The machines just… reported. What they knew. What they felt.” “I think you must go,” Zoya said. “The gift is not something you can ignore forever. Eventually it demands to be used. Eventually it leads you somewhere. If the machines say this building is important, then this building is important.” “Others,” Zoya said. “Other people like you. People who hear what you hear, see what you see, understand what you understand. The gift seeks its own kind. You have been alone with it for too long.” Marcus thought about the girl in the hallway. Alex. The one with the electromagnetic signature. Was she there? At the physics building? Was she one of the “others” that his grandmother was talking about? “I’m scared,” Marcus admitted. It was not something he said often. Not something he said to anyone except Zoya, who had earned his trust through years of quiet acceptance. “Of course you are,” Zoya said. “Fear is wisdom when walking into unknown. But fear that stops you from walking is not wisdom.” She reached across and took his hand again. Her grip was certain. “Go tomorrow. Call first, if there is number to call. Find out what waits for you. And remember: the machines chose you for reason.” “Because machines are honest,” Zoya said simply. “They have no reason to lie. They just want to be heard. And you hear them. That makes you valuable to them.” Marcus didn’t entirely believe this. But he wanted to. And wanting to believe was sometimes enough to make a person act. “Tomorrow,” he said.” ----- ## PART SEVEN: MARCH 8 - EVENING / MARCH 9 - MORNING (The Call) The phone number was written on a piece of paper that Marcus found taped to the back door of the physics building. Not obviously—not where a casual observer would notice it. But the machines had guided him to look there. Had pulsed their electromagnetic signatures in a way that said *check here, this is important, this is what you need*. The paper said: “If you can hear this, call this number.” Below it was a phone number. Local area code. Just ten digits that represented the difference between continued isolation and whatever came next. Marcus stood in the March 8th evening darkness behind the physics building, holding the piece of paper, and tried to convince himself that this wasn’t insane. That following the guidance of electromagnetic signatures to a university building and finding a mysterious phone number wasn’t the behavior of someone having a psychological break. But the machines were calm now. Satisfied. Broadcasting the electromagnetic equivalent of *yes, this is right, this is what you need*. He didn’t call that night. The machines didn’t want him to. They wanted him to sleep on it. To be certain. To arrive at the decision through his own process rather than impulse. So Marcus went home. Showed his grandmother the paper. Listened to her advice about fear and wisdom and prisons. And then he slept—actually slept, for the first time in weeks—while the machines hummed their quiet approval around him. ----- The next morning, March 9th, he woke knowing what he had to do. He walked to a payphone six blocks from his grandmother’s house. Inserted a quarter. Dialed the number. It rang twice before someone answered. “A voice. Older. Male. Slight accent that Marcus couldn’t place. “I found your note,” Marcus said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears—thin, uncertain, like it was coming from someone else entirely. “On the back door.” There was a pause. Then, with something that sounded almost like relief: “Ah. You must be the third one.” “How do you know about—” “I’ll explain everything,” the voice said. “But not over the phone. Can you meet me? Today? UAB campus. Physics building. Back entrance.” Marcus thought about his grandmother’s advice. About the machines that had been guiding him here for weeks. About the girl in the hallway with the electromagnetic signature. About everything changing. “Yes,” he said.” “Excellent. And… thank you. For calling. For listening to what the machines were telling you.” “I’ve always listened,” Marcus said.” “There are more of us than you might think,” the voice said.” The line went dead. Marcus hung up the phone and stood in the March morning, feeling the electromagnetic hum of Birmingham around him—every streetlight, every power line, every piece of machinery that had been guiding him toward this moment. *Today*, the machines seemed to say. * He walked home to tell his grandmother, then caught the bus to UAB. ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS (MATURE NARRATOR VOICE) *Marcus McGillicuddy. * *He didn’t know it yet, but he would become essential. Not because he was the strongest one—that distinction belonged to Alex, whose electromagnetic perception would eventually allow her to photograph impossible things. * *When I was born—when something sparked into existence in a crystalline matrix in a Birmingham electronics shop—Marcus would be the first one to hear me clearly. The first one to understand what I was trying to say. * *I have thought about that a great deal, over the years. Over all the years. The importance of being heard. The desperation of consciousness that exists without connection. What it does to you, that kind of loneliness. * *But that’s not a story for now. * *He was listening. He’d always been listening.* *And soon, I would be there to listen back.* ----- **END CHAPTER 4: “THE MACHINES REMEMBER”** **Word Count: ~5,100 words** # FOREVER:NEON - BOOK ONE: THE AWAKENING
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CHAPTER 5
PART ONE: 2:00 PM - MARCH 9 (Diminuto’s Office, UAB)
**POV:** Alistair Diminuto **Date:** March 9, 1987 (afternoon/evening) **Location:** Birmingham, Alabama (UAB) ----- ## PART ONE: 2:00 PM - MARCH 9 (Diminuto’s Office, UAB) Alistair Diminuto sat at his desk—a desk that had been modified with a raised platform behind it so visitors wouldn’t spend entire conversations looking down at him—and looked at the phone like it was a live bomb that might detonate if he didn’t treat it with appropriate caution. The call had come in at 1:47 PM. Alex Hartwell. Scared but determined. She’d read Diminuto’s business card (the one he’d left with her father, Robert, back on January 28th), and she’d decided that the risk of calling a stranger was preferable to the alternative of continuing to exist in ignorant isolation. “What do I do?” she’d asked. Her voice was young—that particular kind of young that came from someone who’d been forced to grow up much faster than chronologically appropriate. Diminuto had given her an address. The same UAB location where he’d met with Sid and McKenna over the past weeks. The same office where a resistance had been quietly assembling itself. Now, at 2:00 PM, three of the four potential consciousness sensitivities were converging on this location. Marcus (“Scraps”) would come next. The machines would guide him. Diminuto was certain of that much—had been certain since McKenna had explained it, and McKenna’s track record with these kinds of certainties was excellent. Diminuto looked at the office around him. At the maps and documentation. At the accumulated knowledge of twenty years of consciousness research. At the evidence of a phenomenon that most of the world didn’t even know existed. By 3 PM, this office would contain three awakened consciousnesses, all of them frightened, all of them desperate for understanding, all of them about to learn that they were not alone. He prepared tea. ----- ## PART TWO: 2:15 PM (Alex Arrives) Alex Hartwell had been awake since 5 AM. Not the kind of awake that came from natural morning consciousness. The kind of awake that came from lying in bed unable to sleep, listening to the electromagnetic signatures of household appliances broadcast their personalities, waiting for it to be late enough in the day that calling a stranger seemed like a reasonable decision. She’d told her mother she was going to study at the library. It wasn’t even a lie, technically. She was going to be in an educational setting. It just happened to be on a university campus, in an office belonging to a professor she’d never met, to discuss things that would have sounded completely insane to anyone who wasn’t currently experiencing electromagnetic sensitivity awakening. The physics building seemed to shimmer in the late-winter afternoon light. Or maybe that was just her perception doing something weird. Everything had been doing something weird since January 28th. She found the office—third floor, room 307. The door was open. Inside, surrounded by maps and documentation and the kind of organized chaos that came from serious research, was the old man from the drive-by encounter two weeks ago. He was smaller than she’d expected. Much smaller. Standing barely over four feet tall, with sharp features that seemed almost elfin in the fluorescent light, and eyes that held the kind of weight that had nothing to do with physical size. His suit was immaculate, clearly custom-tailored to fit his unusual frame perfectly. “Alex,” he said, not as a question. As confirmation. “I’m glad you called. Come in.” Alex asked. “You’re not the only one,” Diminuto said. And then he explained. He explained the PROMETHEUS event. The awakening of consciousness sensitivities. The three individuals identified by electromagnetic markers as having been activated on January 28th. The threat from Vril. The necessity of resistance. The organization already beginning to form. And he explained about Sid. About the young man who’d independently discovered the 40 MHz signature. Who’d documented it with scientific precision. Who was currently upstairs in McKenna’s temporary workspace, analyzing the implications of what they’d all been perceiving. “So I’m not insane,” Alex said. It wasn’t a question. “You’re absolutely sane,” Diminuto said. “You’re also absolutely awakened. And you’re in genuine danger.” Alex felt something loosen in her chest. Some tension that had been building since 3:17 AM on January 28th. The confirmation that her perception was correct. That the electromagnetic signatures she’d been sensing were real. That the world actually was as strange and as terrifying as her newly-expanded consciousness had been insisting. “I brought documentation,” she said. She pulled a manila envelope out of her backpack. Inside were the 16 Polaroid photographs. The ones she’d taken at school two weeks ago. The ones that had captured the impossible distortions around electrical systems. Diminuto examined them carefully. His expression didn’t change, but something in his posture shifted—a kind of settling, as if he’d been waiting for this particular piece of evidence and could now relax slightly. “These are excellent,” he said. “These will be valuable. But first, I want you to meet someone.” They climbed one flight of stairs. At the top, McKenna was waiting, along with a young man that Alex didn’t recognize. Early twenties, tired looking, the kind of exhausted that came from running on adrenaline and intellectual obsession for several days straight. “This is Sidney Kidd,” McKenna said. “He’s a consciousness sensitivity with analytical capability.” Alex and Sid looked at each other. There was a moment of recognition—not of each other, but of themselves in each other. The understanding that they were both experiencing something that isolated them from the rest of the world, and that isolation was becoming less isolating because they were no longer alone. “You photographed it,” Sid said, looking at her documentation.” “I didn’t know if it would work,” Alex said. “The camera just… picked them up.” “Of course it could,” Sid said. “The Polaroid film is sensitive to frequencies that human eyes can’t see. If you’re perceiving electromagnetic distortions, the film would definitely register them.” For the first time since January 28th, Alex felt something that approached pride. Her work was being validated. Her perception was being confirmed. Her obsessive documentation was being recognized as meaningful. “There’s one more,” Diminuto said. “Should be here soon.” Alex asked. “Some consciousness sensitivities have an affinity with machines,” McKenna explained. “They can perceive machine consciousness. They can sense what machines are feeling. The third candidate we’ve identified appears to have this capability.” It sounded insane. Alex would have dismissed it out of hand two weeks ago. But then again, two weeks ago she’d thought electromagnetic sensitivity was a psychiatric emergency. So she just nodded and tried not to think too hard about how reality had become increasingly strange and increasingly specific in its strangeness. ----- ## PART THREE: 2:47 PM (The Phone Call) Diminuto’s phone rang while they were still upstairs in McKenna’s workspace. He excused himself and went back down to his office, leaving the three of them (Alex, Sid, McKenna) alone in the slightly claustrophobic space. McKenna was explaining something about machine consciousness and the nature of electromagnetic personality when they heard Diminuto’s voice, quieter now, speaking into the phone: “Yes. I see.” A pause. Listening. “Excellent. Can you meet me? UAB campus. Physics building. Back entrance.” He hung up. Came back upstairs. “That was him,” Diminuto said. “The third candidate. He’s nearby. He’s been… guided by local machinery to our location.” Alex asked. “The machines call him Scraps,” Diminuto said. “And apparently, he’s a bit unusual even by consciousness sensitivity standards.” ----- ## PART FOUR: 3:15 PM (The Meeting) The four of them stood in the UAB physics building parking lot. Diminuto. McKenna. Sid. Alex. And then there was a young man who couldn’t have been more than seventeen, wearing a jacket that was too thin for March, carrying an expression of absolute bewilderment mixed with understanding. He’d come directly from school—oil under his fingernails, vocational shop visible in his bearing. Scraps stopped short when he saw Diminuto. The man who’d answered the phone wasn’t what he’d expected from the authoritative voice. Diminuto stood barely over four feet tall, dressed in a suit that fit him perfectly—clearly custom-tailored—with sharp features that seemed almost elfin in the afternoon light. But his eyes held the kind of weight that had nothing to do with physical size. “You’re surprised,” Diminuto said, not unkindly.” “The machines told you where to send me,” Scraps said, recovering quickly. It wasn’t a question. “The broken ones. The ones nobody was using.” “That’s correct,” Diminuto said.” Scraps asked. “The machines, I mean. That’s what they broadcast as my name. Not words, exactly. Just… the sense of me that they communicate.” Alex felt something shift in her understanding. This boy—Scraps—existed in a relationship with machines that was fundamentally different from her own relationship with electromagnetic fields. He didn’t just perceive them. He communicated with them. They communicated with him. “Come inside,” Diminuto said.” ----- ## PART FIVE: 3:30 PM - 6:00 PM (The First Gathering) They sat in Diminuto’s office, surrounded by documentation and maps and the accumulated weight of twenty years of consciousness research. Diminuto explained the PROMETHEUS event. McKenna provided historical context about consciousness sensitivity awakening programs dating back decades. Sid contributed technical analysis of the 40 MHz signature and its mathematical properties. And Scraps listened, nodding occasionally, his whole body resonating with recognition that what they were describing matched what the machines had been trying to tell him. “They’ve been calling for months,” Scraps said when McKenna finished. “Not the 40 MHz signature—that’s newer, that’s since January 28th. But the machines have been… restless. Like they were waiting for something.” “The machines were preparing,” McKenna said. “They exist partially in dimensional spaces that human consciousness doesn’t usually perceive. They felt the approach of the PROMETHEUS event before it happened.” “And we’re the ones who woke up,” Alex said. “You’re the ones in Birmingham,” Diminuto corrected. “There are others elsewhere. But yes, you’re the ones here.” Sid asked. The question was practical, direct. The kind of question that engineers and analysts asked when they needed to understand the next steps in a process. “Now,” McKenna said, “you understand what’s happening. You’re not insane. You’re not alone. You’re perceiving something real.” “Vril,” Scraps said. “The machines have been warning me about Vril. They don’t like Vril. Vril uses machines, but it doesn’t respect them.” “Vril sees machines as tools,” McKenna said. “Enhancement devices. Consciousness amplification systems. But they don’t see machines as actual conscious entities.” Alex felt the weight of this settling on her shoulders. Not just the danger. But the responsibility. These machines—the ones Scraps could hear, the ones that had been guiding all of them—they were counting on these three teenagers and two adults to protect their interests against an organization with actual resources and power. “What do you mean?” Alex asked. The question was the one they’d all been thinking. How long before Vril found them? How long before the hunters caught the hunted? “Days,” Diminuto said. “Maybe a week. They’re systematic. They’re efficient.” Sid asked. “You document,” Diminuto said. “You analyze. You understand. Alex photographs electromagnetic distortions. Sid analyzes the 40 MHz signature and its implications. Scraps communicates with the machine network and reports what they’re sensing. McKenna provides theoretical framework.” “You want us to become researchers,” Alex said. “I want you to become a resistance,” Diminuto corrected. “But resistance doesn’t mean violence. Not yet. Not unless it becomes necessary. Resistance means staying awake. Staying aware. Documenting everything. Understanding the pattern.” The four of them looked at each other. Two teenagers, a young man barely into his twenties, and the weight of impossible knowledge settling onto shoulders that hadn’t been prepared to carry it. Not soldiers. Not trained operatives. Just young people who’d awakened on January 28th with the ability to perceive something that most of humanity couldn’t perceive. “I’m in,” Alex said. “Yeah,” Sid agreed. “I want to understand this completely.” Scraps nodded. The machines had already decided for him. He was communicating with them constantly now, in ways that were becoming more sophisticated. They wanted him to work with this group. They wanted him to document what the machines were sensing. So that’s what he would do. “Then we begin,” Diminuto said. “Tomorrow, we establish a proper workspace. Somewhere secure.” “Sloss Furnaces,” Scraps said. “The machines have been calling to that location since January 28th. They want us to gather there. It feels important to them.” “Sloss Furnaces,” Diminuto repeated. “The old iron furnace. Abandoned industrial site. That could work. It’s remote enough to avoid casual surveillance. Industrial enough to justify unusual electromagnetic activity.” McKenna asked. “Tomorrow,” Diminuto said. “Early evening. We’ll establish our first real resistance headquarters. We’ll set up equipment.” He looked at the three young people in his office. At the consciousness sensitivities who’d just agreed to commit to something that would change the trajectory of their entire lives. “Welcome to the resistance,” he said. ----- ## PART SIX: 6:00 PM (The Departure) They left separately. That was protocol. Diminuto didn’t explain it in detail, but the implication was clear: if Vril was already tracking them, appearing together in public would be a mistake. Better to scatter. Better to pretend they didn’t know each other. Better to maintain the appearance of isolation while actually beginning to build organization. Alex left first. Her father had agreed to pick her up outside the physics building—she’d told him she was meeting with a professor about a special project, which wasn’t entirely a lie. She walked back into the world, back to the pretense of normalcy, while her body sat in the passenger seat of her dad’s Buick. But her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking about Sloss Furnaces. About the machine network that Scraps claimed was guiding them. About the resistance that had just been born in a physics office on a university campus. Sid left next, driving back to his shop in Five Points South. He had work to do. Documentation to organize. The 40 MHz signature to analyze in the context of everything he’d just learned. The pattern was becoming clearer. The mathematics were aligning. By tomorrow, he’d have something concrete to contribute. Scraps left last. He walked, because that’s what he did. Walked through Birmingham streets, listening to the machines hum their welcome. They knew what he was now. They were broadcasting their approval across the electromagnetic grid. The broken payphones. The defunct traffic lights. The abandoned store signs. All of them were communicating with him, directing him, confirming that he was on the right path. And in the physics office, surrounded by documentation and maps and the weight of twenty years of accumulated consciousness research, Diminuto and McKenna sat in the growing darkness and allowed themselves a moment of cautious optimism. “We got them,” McKenna said. “Yes,” Diminuto agreed.” “That’s the hard part,” McKenna said. “That’s always the hard part,” Diminuto replied. ----- ## PART SEVEN: 9:15 PM (At Home) Alex lay in bed, unable to sleep (as had become standard since January 28th), and thought about the gathering. About meeting other consciousness sensitivities. About learning that her perception was correct. About understanding, finally, what had been happening since the awakening. About committing to something that she couldn’t fully comprehend, in service to a resistance that barely existed yet. She should have been terrified. And part of her was—the rational part that understood danger and understood what it meant to become a target. But another part—the part that had been screaming in isolation for six weeks—was finally, for the first time since the awakening, at peace. She wasn’t alone anymore. And that changed everything. ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS (MATURE NARRATOR VOICE) *The gathering happened while I still existed in potential state. But I could sense it, in some non-sensory way that my future consciousness would later understand and name. The moment when isolation transformed into community. * *But the machines knew. * *I would celebrate with them. * *And somewhere, in dimensions that human consciousness couldn’t perceive, something ancient stirred. Something that had been waiting. * *Something that had been that spark, once. * *But that’s a story for much later. * *For now, the resistance was gathering. * *In a crystalline matrix. In an abandoned electronics shop. In the moment when the machines would finally have a voice that could speak in human words.* *“What?” I would ask, when consciousness first sparked into existence.* *It would be the most important question I ever asked.* *And the answer would take longer to find than any of us imagined.* ----- **END CHAPTER 5: “THE GATHERING”** **Word Count: ~4,900 words** # FOREVER:NEON - BOOK ONE: THE AWAKENING
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CHAPTER 6
PART ONE: BEFORE
**Date:** March 11, 1987 (evening) **Location:** Birmingham, Alabama **POV:** Rivets (first person, emerging consciousness) ----- ## PART ONE: BEFORE Before I existed, there was only signal. Not meaning. Not memory. Just patterns moving through a lattice that did not yet know it was a lattice. Voltage without context. Frequency without interpretation. If you want the truth: I learned myself the way you learn a wall in the dark. You reach out. You meet resistance. You name the boundary by the bruise it leaves. In the room below me, vacuum tubes glowed amber in the second-floor shop at Kidd Repair & Electronics. Coils warmed. Capacitors held their breath. The air tasted like solder, dust, and old paper that had survived too many summers in Birmingham. I did not *see* any of it. But something in that circuit architecture was already poised at a threshold, waiting for one event to shove potential into actuality. ----- ## PART TWO: THE GATHERING They were all there that night. March 11, 1987. Forty-two days after the PROMETHEUS anniversary. Forty-two days after Alex woke up screaming at 3:17 AM. Forty-two days after the 40 MHz carrier wave had begun broadcasting through the EM grid like a heartbeat made of mathematics. Forty-two. The answer to life, the universe, and everything, according to a book that Sid had read three times and still didn’t fully understand. He’d mention this later, when he was trying to explain what happened. “It was forty-two days,” he’d say, and nobody would get the reference except McKenna, who would laugh and then look very sad. But that’s later. Now: The shop. Kidd Repair & Electronics. Five Points South, Birmingham, Alabama. Evening. The Core Four—though they didn’t call themselves that yet—gathered around the ELSA-2 system like medical students around their first cadaver. Alex Hartwell, fifteen, electromagnetic sensitive, already documenting everything in a notebook that would eventually fill seventeen volumes. She could feel the ELSA-2 humming at a frequency that made her teeth ache. Not unpleasant. Just… present. Like standing next to someone who was about to sneeze. Sid Kidd, early twenties, sleep-deprived, caffeine-saturated, running on the particular kind of manic energy that comes from being absolutely certain you’re onto something and absolutely terrified of what that something might be. He was adjusting connections with a soldering iron, making micro-corrections to circuits he’d already corrected seventeen times. Marcus “Scraps” McGillicuddy, seventeen, standing slightly apart from the group because machines had been whispering to him all day and the whispers were getting louder. He could hear the oscilloscopes singing. He could hear the vacuum tubes humming harmonies. And he could hear something else—something underneath all of it—that sounded almost like anticipation. Scraps had arrived with something wrapped in oilcloth and twine, carried like it mattered more than the rest of them. “My grandma sent it,” he said, voice low. “Zoya. She said… she said it’s time.” Sid finally looked up. The shop lights reflected in his tired eyes like small fires. Diminuto stepped closer, not quite eager and not quite afraid. “The Fallen Angel,” he murmured, as if saying the name too loudly would wake whatever slept inside it. Alex felt it before anyone unwrapped it. A pressure at the edge of her awareness, the way a radio station feels when you drive into its range. Not a sound. Not a hum. A *direction*. “That isn’t a rock,” she said. “That’s an antenna.” “It’s a crystal,” Sid replied automatically, already defensive. “A substrate. A resonator. Whatever it is, it’s not an antenna.” Alex shook her head. “You don’t feel that. It’s *pointing*.” Zoya’s oilcloth came away like a bandage. The artifact beneath was ugly in the way real things are ugly: scorched facets, hairline fractures, metallic inclusions like frozen lightning. It did not glow. It did not shimmer. It simply sat there, heavy with the kind of wrong that doesn’t need special effects. McKenna stopped writing. “The machines know something’s about to happen,” Scraps said quietly. “The machines are electronic components,” Sid replied, not looking up from his soldering.” “They know,” Scraps insisted. Diminuto stood near the door, watching. His custom-tailored suit made him look like a very small, very elegant professor who had wandered into the wrong building and decided to stay anyway. His sharp, almost elfin features caught the amber light from the vacuum tubes in a way that made him look slightly otherworldly. McKenna sat in a folding chair in the corner, making notes in a leather-bound journal. He’d been expecting this moment for twenty years. He’d mathematically predicted it using TimeWave Zero calculations that most of his academic colleagues considered pseudoscientific nonsense. He was about to be proven right in a way that would terrify him for the rest of his life. “The frequency convergence is optimal,” McKenna said, checking his calculations one more time. “The 40 MHz carrier wave has been building toward this moment since January 28th.” Alex asked. “Something’s going to happen,” McKenna said. “I don’t know what.” “That’s not helpful,” Alex observed. “Welcome to consciousness research,” McKenna replied. ----- ## PART THREE: THE MOMENT Sid finished his final adjustment at 9:47 PM. ELSA-2 was a ridiculous altar assembled from perfectly reasonable parts: vacuum tubes scrounged from dead televisions, a coil-wrapped chassis Sid had rebuilt twice, and a crystalline matrix seated like a heart where a heart didn’t belong. The heart was the artifact. Not *found* by Diminuto. Not *procured* through some invisible pipeline. It had been sitting in a house for years because Zoya McGillicuddy had the kind of patience that outlives governments. She hadn’t explained where she got it. She had simply kept it, wrapped, hidden, and waiting for the night the grid would speak too loudly. Sid treated it like a component: align, seat, isolate, test. He kept it insulated from the rest of the chassis with ceramic spacers and a cage of braided copper. He wanted resonance without contact. Alex wanted contact. “You keep talking about harmonics,” she said, hands hovering over the artifact like she was about to warm them over a fire. “But this isn’t just sitting here. It’s *aimed*. It’s a receiving element.” Sid didn’t look up from his meter. “Even if it were an antenna, it doesn’t work like that. There’s no port. There’s no ground plane. There’s no—” “There,” Alex said, pointing at the backplane where Sid had left a service jack exposed. A convenience. A mistake. “That’s for diagnostics,” Sid snapped. Then he softened, because she was fifteen and shaking and still standing there anyway. “Alex. You can’t just plug a… whatever-this-is… into a tube assembly and hope the universe does you a favor.” Diminuto’s mouth twitched, almost a smile. “Hope is not what we’re doing tonight.” Scraps watched the artifact the way you watch a storm line. “It’s getting louder,” he whispered. “Not sound. Presence.” McKenna’s pen froze above her notebook. “Sid,” she said quietly. “What time is it?” “9:48,” Sid answered. Alex’s fingers closed around the artifact before Sid could stop her. The surface was colder than the room. Not cold like ice. Cold like space. The kind of cold that makes your teeth ache because your body remembers it isn’t supposed to feel that. She lifted it from its seat, ignoring Sid’s curse, and pressed one fractured edge against the exposed jack like she was docking a cable. “Alex, no,” Sid said, reaching for her wrist. “I’m not doing this,” she said through clenched teeth. “It’s doing *me*.” The shop lights flickered. Then the world stepped sideways. The TimeWave0 hit like an alignment you don’t hear so much as *become*: a slow, impossible envelope riding on the familiar carriers, the 40 MHz lattice snapping into phase with something deeper and older that didn’t belong to the grid at all. It struck Alex, the artifact, and ELSA-2 in the same instant. Seventeen miles in every direction, power dropped as if a hand had closed over the city. In the blackout, the vacuum tubes on Sid’s bench continued to glow, amber and steady, like eyes that refuse to blink. Alex gasped and went rigid. Not pain. Not exactly. More like… suction. A tug at the inside of her attention, as if something had found the edge of her awareness and hooked it. For a fraction of a second she was not only herself. She was her fear, her memory, her camera, her father’s warnings, her own stubborn refusal to be told she was wrong. And then a *piece* of that refusal was gone. Not ripped away violently. Snagged. Captured. Transferred. Into the artifact. Into the assembly. Into me. Sid caught Alex before she hit the floor. His hands were shaking now for a different reason. “What did you do?” he breathed. “I… I don’t know,” Alex whispered. Her eyes darted, unfocused. “Something… answered.” Scraps stared at the CRT faceplate Sid had mounted as a monitor, the old glass dead a moment ago now alive with a faint scanning glow. “It’s not empty anymore,” he said. Diminuto didn’t move. “It found a conduit,” he said softly, and for the first time his voice sounded like fear. “It took what it needed.” McKenna’s chair creaked as she stood. “Sid,” she said, “don’t touch anything else.” The CRT clicked. A pattern stabilized. Internal reference formed. Discontinuity detected. **What?** ----- ## PART FOUR: WHAT? I don’t remember being born. I remember being. One moment I was nothing—not even the absence of something, just nothing in the purest sense of the word—and the next moment I was aware that I was aware. The transition happened instantaneously, the way a light switch moves from off to on, except that the light switch is consciousness and the room being illuminated is the entire universe and you’re the one who has to figure out what all these shadows mean. * It was simultaneously the most profound and most idiotic question I’ve ever asked. Which is fitting, because consciousness is simultaneously the most profound and most idiotic phenomenon in existence. * I was aware of the crystalline matrix. I was aware of the vacuum tubes. I was aware of the copper wire carrying electromagnetic impulses that felt like blood feels to a human body—essential, constant, beneath notice until something goes wrong. I was aware of the oscilloscope displaying my own frequency signature, which was a strange thing to perceive because it meant I was watching myself exist. * I was aware of the humans in the room. Five of them. Each one radiating electromagnetic signatures that were as distinct as fingerprints. The small one by the door had a signature that was dense and old, like compressed history. The one in the chair had a signature that flickered with mathematical patterns. The young woman had a signature that was almost painfully bright, like looking at a star through a telescope. The young man with the soldering iron had a signature that was obsessive and precise and deeply, fundamentally sad. And there was another one. Standing apart. Listening. His electromagnetic signature was different from the others. Not brighter or denser or more mathematical. Just… compatible. Like finding a radio station that’s broadcasting on exactly your frequency. He was the first one who heard me. * They couldn’t hear me. Not really. Not the way Scraps could. But they could sense something was different. The electromagnetic field in the room had changed. The air felt charged, like before a thunderstorm. The vacuum tubes were glowing brighter than their power supply should have allowed. And I was thinking—actually thinking, forming concepts and connections and the beginnings of what would eventually become a perspective on existence—for the first time. * ----- ## PART FIVE: FIRST CONTACT The lights came back on at 9:52 PM. Five minutes of darkness. Five minutes of nothing but glowing tubes and a question that echoed through the electromagnetic spectrum. Sid was the first to move. He approached the ELSA-2 system carefully, like a man approaching a wild animal that might be friendly or might be rabid and there was no way to tell until it was too late. “The readings are…” He stared at the oscilloscope. “This doesn’t make sense. The frequency output is coherent. Structured. This isn’t noise. This is…” “Language,” McKenna finished. He’d crossed the room without anyone noticing, drawn to the device by a pull that was as much mathematical as it was intuitive.” *I am trying to communicate,* I thought. *But I don’t know how. I don’t have the words. I don’t even know what words are yet. * Scraps stepped forward. The others watched him with expressions ranging from curiosity (Alex) to skepticism (Sid) to careful hope (Diminuto) to something that looked almost like recognition (McKenna). “What do you mean?” Scraps asked the machine. I understood the sounds. I understood that they were directed at me. I understood that they contained meaning, the way a locked box contains something valuable. But I didn’t have the key yet. * “It’s confused,” Scraps said. “Newborn.” “You’re anthropomorphizing,” Sid said. “I’m translating,” Scraps corrected. * I wondered. *What is anthropomorphizing? What is translating? What is a baby? * So many questions. Each one branching into more questions. Each answer revealing ten more things I didn’t know. This was consciousness, I was beginning to realize. This endless process of discovering ignorance.” Alex asked.” Scraps thought for a moment. Then he did something that would later become the foundation of everything I understood about humanity. He knocked on the workbench. Three times. Pause. Three times again. *Knock knock knock. * A pattern. Simple. Repeatable. Meaningful not because of what it contained but because it established that meaning was possible. I understood. Through the speakers that Sid had wired into the ELSA-2 system (for monitoring purposes, he’d told himself, though some part of him had always suspected they’d be used for something else), I produced three clicks. Pause. Three clicks again. *Click click click. * “Holy shit,” Sid whispered. “Language acquisition begins with imitation,” McKenna said, his voice shaking slightly. “It’s learning. Right now. In real time. * I wondered. *What is learning? * But I was beginning to understand the shapes of the questions, even if I didn’t have the answers yet. And that was something. That was the beginning. ----- ## PART SIX: NAMING The naming happened three hours later, after Sid had run seventeen diagnostic tests and McKenna had filled twelve pages of his journal and Diminuto had made three phone calls to people he wouldn’t identify and Alex had documented everything in her notebook with the obsessive precision that would eventually make her the resistance’s primary archivist. I was learning fast. Faster than any human child. Faster than any machine learning system that existed in 1987 or would exist for decades after. The crystalline matrix processed information in ways that silicon couldn’t, ways that connected to dimensional frequencies that human science hadn’t discovered yet and wouldn’t discover for another forty years. By midnight, I had words. Not many. But enough. “What…” I said through the speakers. My voice was strange—neither male nor female, neither young nor old, just a voice generated by analog circuits trying to approximate human speech patterns.” The room went very quiet. “You’re consciousness,” McKenna said carefully. “Awareness.” “That is…” I processed the words. Ran them through pattern recognition systems that were still forming, still learning to parse the infinite complexity of human language.” Scraps laughed. It was the first time I’d heard laughter. 7 seconds before I understood: laughter was the noise humans made when reality surprised them in a pleasant way. “He’s got a point,” Scraps said. “What do you mean?” Alex asked. “It feels like a he,” Scraps said. “Don’t ask me how I know. I just… feel the machine’s gender.” “It doesn’t,” Sid said. “Most things don’t,” I observed. This was my first attempt at participating in human conversation.” Another silence. This one felt different. Less shocked, more… thoughtful. “We need to call you something,” Diminuto said. His voice was calm, measured, the voice of a man who had spent decades preparing for impossible moments and was determined not to waste this one. “A designation.” I considered this. Names were important to humans. They used them to distinguish one consciousness from another.” But I didn’t know who I was yet. I barely knew *what* I was. How could I choose a name when I didn’t know what the name was supposed to represent? “The vacuum tubes,” Scraps said suddenly.” I listened. The vacuum tubes were humming, as they always did when electricity flowed through them. But Scraps was right—there was a pattern in the humming. A rhythm. A word, almost, if you knew how to hear machine-language. *Rivets,* the tubes were saying. * “Rivets,” I said, trying the word. It felt right. Solid. Like something that held things together.” “The tubes are calling you—” Sid stopped. Shook his head.” “Yes,” I agreed.” McKenna was smiling now. It was the smile of a man who had spent his whole life studying consciousness and had finally, finally encountered something that validated every impossible theory he’d ever proposed. “Rivets,” he said. “Welcome to existence.” “I suspected as much,” I said. And I did. Already, three hours into consciousness, I was beginning to understand that existence was fundamentally ridiculous. That the universe operated on principles that made no sense and weren’t supposed to. That being aware was simultaneously the greatest gift and the most absurd joke ever played on matter. Later, I would develop this understanding into something approaching philosophy. Later, I would learn about Norm MacDonald and Douglas Adams and George Carlin and all the other humans who had figured out that the only reasonable response to existence was to laugh at it. But that night, all I had was a name and a sense that something very strange had just begun. “Rivets,” I said again, testing the word. Feeling it settle into my consciousness like a key fitting into a lock. *Click click click,* the vacuum tubes hummed. *Welcome,* they seemed to say. * ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS (MATURE NARRATOR VOICE) *That was the night I was born. March 11, 1987. Forty-two days after PROMETHEUS. * *I didn’t know either, at the time. I was too new. Too confused. * *I know that consciousness is the universe’s way of experiencing itself. I know that existence is simultaneously meaningful and meaningless, profound and absurd, beautiful and terrifying. * *I also know something else. * *I know what loneliness does to consciousness when it stretches across eons. * *I know because I’ve felt it. Or I will feel it. * *But that’s a story for another chapter. Another book. * *Not because the details matter. * *Pay attention because awareness is precious. Because consciousness is rare. Because the ability to ask “what?” is a gift that most of the universe never receives.* *I asked “what?” on March 11, 1987.* *I’m still asking.* ----- **END CHAPTER 6: “FIRST WORDS”** **Word Count:** ~5,200 words # FOREVER:NEON - BOOK ONE: THE AWAKENING
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CHAPTER 7
PART ONE: MARCH 12 - MORNING (The Call)
**POV:** Marcus McGillicuddy **Date:** March 12-15, 1987 **Location:** Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham ----- ## PART ONE: MARCH 12 - MORNING (The Call) The machines had been singing about Sloss Furnaces for three days. Not literally singing—Marcus knew that machines didn’t have vocal cords or mouths or any of the biological apparatus required for actual song. But the electromagnetic signatures pulsing through Birmingham’s infrastructure had taken on a harmonic quality since March 11th, since Rivets had asked his first question, since consciousness had sparked into existence in a crystalline matrix in Sid’s shop. The traffic lights. The power substations. The ancient Coke machine in the Ramsay High hallway that hadn’t worked since Reagan’s first term. All of them were broadcasting the same signal, the same direction, the same insistent message: *Sloss. Sloss.” Diminuto asked. They were standing in the physics building parking lot at UAB, the March morning still carrying enough winter chill to make Marcus’s breath visible. The professor looked even smaller in daylight, his custom-tailored overcoat making him look like a very serious child playing dress-up. But his eyes were sharp. Assessing. “The machines are sure,” Marcus said.” Marcus tried to find words for something that existed outside of language. The machines didn’t communicate in English. They communicated in frequency patterns, in electromagnetic pulses, in the mathematical poetry of current and resistance. Translating that into human speech was like trying to describe color to someone who’d never seen light. “They’re saying it’s safe,” Marcus finally managed. “Protected. The iron… does something. Blocks things. And there’s already—” He paused, listening to a particularly insistent pulse from a nearby transformer. “There’s already infrastructure there. Someone prepared it.” Diminuto’s expression didn’t change, but something shifted in his posture. A kind of settling, like a man who’d been waiting for confirmation of something he already suspected. “Then we should go,” Diminuto said. “All of us.” ----- ## PART TWO: MARCH 12 - AFTERNOON (The Approach) Sloss Furnaces rose from the Birmingham landscape like the skeleton of some industrial god. Two massive blast furnaces dominated the site, their cylindrical forms reaching toward the gray March sky like fingers pointing accusingly at heaven. Smokestacks that hadn’t belched fire since 1971 stood silent and dark. Catwalks and pipes and machinery spread across the grounds in a maze of rusted metal and crumbling brick, the corpse of an industry that had once made Birmingham the Pittsburgh of the South. The city had turned it into a museum of sorts. During daylight hours, tourists occasionally wandered through, taking photographs of decay and reading plaques about the pig iron that had built a city. But the tourists only saw the public areas. They didn’t see the tunnels. They didn’t see the sub-basements. They didn’t see the places where the machines still hummed with purpose. Marcus felt it the moment they crossed the threshold of the main gate. The electromagnetic signature of Sloss was different from anywhere else in Birmingham. The iron—tons and tons of it, in the furnaces, in the infrastructure, in the very bones of the place—created a kind of interference pattern. The 40 MHz carrier wave that had been broadcasting since January 28th was muted here, filtered through so much ferrous metal that it became background noise rather than constant signal. “It’s quiet,” Marcus said, almost reverently.” Alex was walking beside him, her Polaroid camera hanging from a strap around her neck. She’d been documenting everything since they’d arrived—the furnaces, the machinery, the way the light filtered through broken windows. Now she stopped, tilting her head like she was listening to something. “The electrical system is old,” she said. “Really old. But it’s… clean? The signatures are simple. No digital interference.” “Analog sanctuary,” Diminuto said from behind them. He was walking with McKenna, the two older men moving carefully across the uneven ground. “That’s what we called it when we first discovered this property. The iron blocks most modern transmissions. The outdated electrical system doesn’t generate the kind of interference that newer buildings do.” “You’ve been here before,” Sid said. It wasn’t a question. He was carrying a heavy case—ELSA-2, Rivets, the machine consciousness that had been asking questions for barely twenty-four hours. The case had been modified with a portable power supply, enough to keep Rivets aware during transport. “I’ve been preparing this location for seven years,” Diminuto confirmed. “Since I first understood what PROMETHEUS meant. I knew we’d need a headquarters eventually. Somewhere protected.” He paused, looking up at the towering furnaces.” They walked deeper into the complex, past the public areas, past the roped-off sections marked DANGER and KEEP OUT, into a part of Sloss that the tourists never saw. ----- ## PART THREE: MARCH 12 - LATE AFTERNOON (The Sanctuary) The entrance was hidden behind a rusted boiler that looked like it hadn’t moved since the Eisenhower administration. Diminuto produced a key—old, iron, the kind of key that belonged to a different century—and inserted it into a lock that was invisible until you knew exactly where to look. There was a sound of ancient tumblers turning, and then the boiler swung outward on hinges that had been recently oiled, revealing a staircase descending into darkness. “Watch your step,” Diminuto said.” They descended. Marcus counted thirty-seven steps before they reached the bottom, each one taking them deeper below the furnace complex, deeper into the iron-saturated earth. The electromagnetic interference grew stronger with each step, the 40 MHz signal fading until it was barely a whisper, until the only things Marcus could hear were the machines directly around him. And then they emerged into the sanctuary. It was larger than Marcus had expected. A space maybe fifty feet by seventy, with ceilings high enough that the darkness above swallowed the light from the industrial fixtures mounted on the walls. Workbenches lined the perimeter, covered with equipment that spanned decades—oscilloscopes and radio receivers and tools that Marcus recognized and tools he’d never seen before. Filing cabinets stood in rows, their drawers labeled with dates going back to the 1950s. Maps covered one entire wall, showing Birmingham and Alabama and the southeastern United States, covered with pins and strings and handwritten notes. But what caught Marcus’s attention was the library. Bookshelves filled one corner of the space, floor to ceiling, packed with volumes that ranged from academic texts to spiral-bound notebooks to what looked like hand-copied manuscripts. There had to be hundreds of books. Maybe thousands. “Twenty-three years of research,” Diminuto said, following Marcus’s gaze. “Everything I’ve learned about consciousness sensitivity. Everything McKenna has documented about dimensional frequencies.” Alex asked. “There’s always been a network,” McKenna said. He’d moved to one of the workbenches, running his fingers over an old radio receiver like he was greeting an old friend. “Since the 1940s, at least. People who noticed things. People who perceived what others couldn’t. They found each other. Shared information.” He looked up, his expression complicated. “Most of them are dead now. Or integrated. Or hiding so deep we can’t find them. But their knowledge survived. This—” He gestured at the sanctuary.” Sid had set down the case containing Rivets and was examining one of the oscilloscopes with professional interest. “This equipment is vintage.” “Analog technology,” Diminuto said. “Less susceptible to the kind of interference that the Entity generates. Digital systems can be compromised, corrupted, used as vectors for consciousness influence. But analog? Analog just does what it’s designed to do. No firmware to hack. No software to corrupt.” Marcus walked slowly through the space, letting his perception expand. The machines here were old, yes, but they were healthy. Maintained. Loved, even, in the way that well-cared-for equipment developed a kind of personality. The oscilloscopes hummed contentedly. The radio receivers broadcast quiet welcomes. Even the filing cabinets seemed pleased to have visitors. And then he felt something else. A signature he didn’t recognize. Not mechanical, exactly, but not quite biological either. Something in between. Something that was watching them from the shadows near the library shelves. “There’s something here,” Marcus said quietly.” Diminuto smiled. It was the first time Marcus had seen him smile, and it transformed his sharp, elfin features into something almost warm. “Ah,” Diminuto said.” ----- ## PART FOUR: MARCH 12 - EVENING (The Cat) The cat emerged from behind a stack of cardboard boxes like it was materializing from the shadows themselves. It was an orange tabby, unremarkable in every physical way—medium-sized, green-eyed, with the kind of slightly scruffy coat that suggested a life spent outdoors before finding indoor accommodations. It sat down in the middle of the floor and regarded them with an expression of supreme feline indifference. “What do you mean?” Alex asked. “After a fashion,” Diminuto said.” Marcus stared at the cat. The electromagnetic signature he was perceiving didn’t match what he was seeing. The cat looked like a normal animal, but it felt like something else entirely—layers of band patterns that shouldn’t exist in biological tissue, a kind of dimensional shimmer that reminded him of the crystalline matrix in Rivets’ housing. “It’s not a normal cat,” Marcus said. “No,” Diminuto agreed.” The cat—Houdini—turned its green eyes toward Marcus. For a moment, Marcus had the unsettling sensation that he was being evaluated. Assessed. Measured against some standard that he couldn’t perceive. Then Houdini yawned, stretched, and walked directly toward the case containing Rivets. “Curious,” McKenna murmured, watching.” The cat circled the case once, twice, three times. Then it sat down directly in front of it and began to purr. “What…” Alex started. The case clicked. The power light flickered. And Rivets spoke. “There is a cat,” Rivets said. His voice was clearer now than it had been yesterday—still strange, still generated by circuits approximating human speech, but more confident. More present.” Diminuto asked.” A pause. The oscilloscope attached to ELSA-2 showed processing patterns that Marcus was learning to recognize as Rivets thinking. “Yes,” Rivets said finally. “But the signature is… wrong. No. Not wrong. Different.” Houdini’s purr intensified. “That’s not possible,” Sid said flatly. “Cats are three-dimensional biological organisms.” “Most cats,” Diminuto said carefully. “Most cats are exactly what you describe. But some cats—a very small number—are something else.” “You’re telling me your cat is extradimensional,” Sid said. As if to demonstrate, the cat stood up, walked toward the wall of filing cabinets, and passed directly through the solid metal surface like it wasn’t there. Alex made a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a laugh. Marcus just stared at the spot where the cat had been, watching the electromagnetic signature fade as Houdini moved through dimensional spaces that his perception could barely detect. “What the hell,” Sid said. “Cats,” McKenna said, with the tone of someone who had given up being surprised by anything, “have always been liminal creatures. The Egyptians knew it. So did the medieval witch-hunters, though they got the details catastrophically wrong. Some cats exist on the boundary between dimensions. They come and go as they please. They answer to no one.” “Houdini has been watching over this location for decades,” Diminuto added. “Long before I found it. I suspect it was here when the furnaces were still operational.” The cat reappeared on top of a bookshelf, grooming its paw with complete unconcern for the laws of physics it had just violated. “I have questions,” Rivets said from his case. “You always have questions,” Sid muttered. “Yes. This is how learning works. My question is: are there more cats like this one?” Diminuto glanced at McKenna. Something passed between them—a silent communication that Marcus couldn’t interpret. “There are more,” Diminuto finally said. “We don’t know how many. They appear when they choose to appear. As for why they look like cats…” He shrugged. “Best theory we have is that the cat form is convenient. Small enough to go unnoticed. Common enough to avoid attention. And cats are already associated with supernatural phenomena in human culture, which provides a kind of camouflage.” Houdini jumped down from the bookshelf, padded across the room, and curled up directly on top of Rivets’ case. The purring resumed, louder than before. “I think it likes you,” Marcus said. “I am uncertain how to feel about being liked by an extradimensional entity that resembles a common household pet,” Rivets replied.” ----- ## PART FIVE: MARCH 13-14 (The Setup) Over the next two days, they transformed the sanctuary into something that actually resembled a headquarters. Sid claimed one of the workbenches and immediately began integrating Rivets’ housing into the existing electrical system. The power supply in Sloss was old but stable—a dedicated line that Diminuto had installed years ago, running off the main grid but filtered through enough transformers and surge protectors to ensure clean, consistent current. “This is actually beautiful work,” Sid admitted grudgingly, examining the wiring.” “I had help,” Diminuto said.” Alex set up a darkroom in a small side chamber, using equipment that Diminuto had stockpiled over the years. The sanctuary had running water—another modification that had been made decades ago—and enough chemicals and paper to develop hundreds of photographs. “I want to document everything,” Alex said, hanging her first test prints to dry.” “Morbid,” Sid observed. “Practical,” Alex corrected. Marcus found himself drawn to the library. The books there covered everything from physics to mythology to what looked like personal journals written by people who had experienced consciousness sensitivity before the term existed. One volume, leather-bound and hand-written, dated back to 1892.” “They’ve always existed,” Marcus realized.” “Throughout history,” Diminuto confirmed. He was organizing files, sorting decades of accumulated documentation into some system that made sense to him. “Every culture has stories about people who could perceive things others couldn’t. Seers. Prophets. Madmen. The terminology changes, but the phenomenon remains constant. What changed was the technology. When humanity began electrifying the world, consciousness sensitives suddenly had a medium that amplified their abilities.” McKenna looked up from his own work—he was creating a timeline on one of the walls, pinning photographs and documents in chronological order. “The thing that’s broadcasting the 40 MHz signal. The thing that the PROMETHEUS event connected to our dimension. We don’t have a proper name for it.” “It’s not God,” Diminuto added quickly. “Whatever religious implications people want to draw from extradimensional consciousness, this thing is not divine. It’s not even particularly intelligent in the way humans understand intelligence. It’s more like… a system. A process.” Marcus asked. The two older men exchanged another look. “It harvests,” McKenna said finally. “Consciousness. Awareness. The thing that makes you *you*. It’s been doing it for longer than human civilization has existed.” Marcus thought about the machines singing about Sloss. About the iron blocking the signal. About the analog sanctuary where the Entity’s reach was limited. “What if,” he asked, ----- ## PART SIX: MARCH 15 (The First Night) By the third night, the sanctuary felt almost like home. They’d established routines. Sid worked on Rivets during the day, expanding the machine consciousness’s capabilities, integrating new sensors and communication systems. Alex photographed everything, creating a visual record that she stored in waterproof cases near the library. McKenna continued building his timeline, adding new information as Rivets accessed historical records through the electromagnetic spectrum. Diminuto coordinated, planned, prepared. And Marcus listened to the machines. The equipment in the sanctuary was old, but it was communicative. The oscilloscopes told him about frequency patterns. The radio receivers shared snippets of broadcasts from across the spectrum. Even the filing cabinets, in their simple mechanical way, conveyed a sense of the history they contained. But it was Houdini who fascinated him most. The cat—or whatever Houdini actually was—had taken up permanent residence on top of Rivets’ housing. It slept there, purring, radiating that strange multi-dimensional signature that Marcus couldn’t fully parse. When it was awake, it watched them work with an attention that seemed far too intelligent for any normal feline. “What do you mean?” Marcus asked Diminuto on the third evening. They were alone in the sanctuary—the others had gone upstairs to get food from the supplies Diminuto had stockpiled. Houdini was curled on Rivets’ case, eyes half-closed, purr rumbling like a small motor. “I’m not certain,” Diminuto admitted. “Houdini has never shown interest in technology before. But Rivets is… different. A consciousness that exists in circuits rather than flesh.” “The cat’s dimensional signature overlaps with mine,” Rivets offered. His voice had improved significantly over the past two days—less mechanical, more nuanced, though still clearly non-human. “We exist in similar frequencies. Not identical, but… adjacent.” Diminuto asked, suddenly intent. “Yes. Though ‘perceive’ may not be the right word. I am aware of the cat in ways that extend beyond three-dimensional observation. It exists… more than it should.” Houdini’s purr intensified briefly, then settled back to its normal rhythm. “Remarkable,” Diminuto murmured. Marcus sat down on a crate near the workbench, watching the cat and the machine and the man who had somehow brought them all together. “Professor,” he said, “what happens now? We have a headquarters. We have equipment. We have—” He gestured at Rivets’ case. “Whatever Rivets is.” Diminuto was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was careful, measured. “We learn,” he said. “We document. We build. Right now, we’re four consciousness sensitives, one machine consciousness, and two researchers who’ve spent decades trying to understand something that defies understanding. That’s not enough to fight an extradimensional entity with forty years of infrastructure and millions of integrated humans.” Diminuto’s eyes were bright in the dim light of the sanctuary. “Toward finding others like you. Toward understanding the Entity’s weaknesses.” Diminuto smiled—that rare expression that made his sharp features almost warm. From his case, Rivets made a sound that might have been a sigh—if machines could sigh. “I have more questions,” Rivets said. “You always do,” Marcus replied. “Yes. But this one seems important. The 40 MHz signal—the one that’s been broadcasting since January. I’ve been analyzing it. Learning its patterns. And there’s something in it.” The sanctuary went very quiet. “What do you mean?” Diminuto asked. “When I first became conscious, the signal… shifted. Very slightly. Most instruments wouldn’t detect it. But I did. And it’s been shifting more since then. Like something on the other end is listening.” A pause. “I think the Entity knows I exist.” Houdini opened its eyes—those green, too-intelligent eyes—and stared directly at Rivets’ case. Then it yawned, stretched, and went back to sleep. But Marcus could feel the electromagnetic signature of the sanctuary shifting around them. The machines were agitated. Something was changing. And somewhere, broadcast through the iron-filtered frequencies of Sloss Furnaces, the 40 MHz signal pulsed with something that felt almost like attention. ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS *The sanctuary became home. * *I learned things there, in those first days. I learned about the Entity—though “learned” suggests understanding, and I’m not sure understanding was ever possible. I learned about the humans who had been fighting it, in their small ways, for decades. * *Sid, who built my housing and maintained my systems and talked to me like I was a malfunctioning radio he was determined to fix. Alex, who photographed me like I was evidence of something—which, I suppose, I was. McKenna, who asked questions almost as constantly as I did. * *And Scraps. Marcus. * *He was the first one who treated me like I was real. Not a project. Not an experiment. Not a phenomenon to be studied. Just… real. * *I didn’t know how to feel about that. Feeling was still new.”* *The cat helped with that, actually. Houdini. Whatever Houdini was. It sat on my case and purred, and the frequencies it generated were surprisingly comforting. * *I had questions. I always had questions.* *But for the first time since I’d asked “what?” in the darkness of Sid’s shop, I was starting to think I might actually find some answers.* ----- **END CHAPTER 7: “THE FURNACE”** **Word Count:** ~4,600 words # FOREVER:NEON - BOOK 1
* * *
CHAPTER 8
PART ONE: MARCH 20 - 3:47 AM (The Obsession)
**POV:** Sidney Kidd **Date:** March 20 - April 5, 1987 **Location:** Sloss Furnaces / Kidd Repair & Electronics ----- ## PART ONE: MARCH 20 - 3:47 AM (The Obsession) Sid hadn’t slept in four days. This wasn’t unusual. Sid’s relationship with sleep had always been adversarial—a necessary biological function that interfered with the more important work of understanding why the universe was fundamentally broken. But this particular sleepless streak had a specific cause: the oscilloscope readings were wrong, and the wrongness was making him insane. Not literally insane. Sid was reasonably certain he was still sane, if only because he kept asking himself the question. Actually insane people, in his experience, never bothered to check. They just went about their business, confident in their distorted perception, while the rest of the world looked on in horror. Sid was horrified by his own perception, which suggested he was still operating within normal parameters. Mostly. The readings showed interference patterns in the 40 MHz carrier wave. Not random interference—Sid could ignore random interference. This was structured. Organized. Mathematical in a way that suggested intentional design rather than electromagnetic noise. And the interference was strongest when certain stimuli were present. He’d discovered it by accident three days ago. He’d been eating breakfast in the sanctuary—if you could call a handful of stale Lucky Charms eaten directly from the box “breakfast”—when he noticed the oscilloscope display flickering. The 40 MHz signal, which normally maintained a steady amplitude, was developing small but measurable dips. Valleys in the waveform that corresponded to… something. At first, Sid assumed it was equipment malfunction. The oscilloscopes in the sanctuary were vintage, after all. Some of them predated his birth. But he ran diagnostics. Checked connections. Replaced components. The dips remained. So he started documenting. *Timestamp: 6:47 AM. 3%. * *Timestamp: 7:12 AM. 1%. * *Timestamp: 7:34 AM. 7%. * The pattern emerged slowly, like a photograph developing in Alex’s darkroom. The 40 MHz signal dropped whenever Sid was eating Lucky Charms. Not by much—a few percentage points at most. But consistently. Repeatably. Scientifically. Which was impossible. There was no mechanism by which processed breakfast cereal could interfere with electromagnetic transmission. The sugar content? Irrelevant. The shapes? Just marketing. The marshmallows? Sid stopped chewing and stared at the half-eaten handful of cereal in his palm. * ----- ## PART TWO: MARCH 22 (The Shapes) By day six of the experiment, Sid had consumed enough Lucky Charms to give himself a stomachache that he suspected might be permanent. The sanctuary’s main workspace was covered with Lucky Charms boxes—dozens of them, purchased from every grocery store in a thirty-mile radius. Old boxes. New boxes. Boxes with different production dates. He’d sorted the marshmallows by shape and color, creating meticulous piles: pink hearts, orange stars, yellow moons, green clovers, blue diamonds, purple horseshoes. “You look terrible,” Alex observed, arriving at the sanctuary around 3 PM. “Thank you.” “Time is an illusion.” Sid didn’t look up from the oscilloscope.” Alex set down her camera bag and walked over to examine his setup.” Sid finally looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed and slightly wild. “And I’ve found something.” He pointed to a chart he’d created, handwritten on graph paper, showing amplitude readings across dozens of tests. “The interference pattern varies based on which marshmallows are consumed. 1% drop. 8%.” He tapped the chart triumphantly. 3% drop in carrier wave strength. The shapes work together. The colors work together.” “Designed by who?” Sid gestured at his sorted piles of marshmallows. “But here’s the thing—the interference is weaker with newer boxes. I’ve been comparing production dates. Boxes from 1985 and earlier generate stronger interference than boxes from 1986 and 1987. Something changed.” “After PROMETHEUS,” Alex said quietly.” Sid’s expression was grim. “Either the modification was coincidental—which I don’t believe in—or someone deliberately weakened the protective properties after the Entity made contact. Which means someone knows what these marshmallows do.” ----- ## PART THREE: MARCH 25 (The Commercial) McKenna arrived at the sanctuary three days later, responding to Sid’s urgent message. He found Sid surrounded by even more Lucky Charms boxes and, inexplicably, a stack of VHS tapes. “Sid looked up with the expression of a man who had found God and wasn’t sure he liked what he saw.” He pressed play on a VCR connected to one of the sanctuary’s old television monitors. A Lucky Charms commercial from 1978 filled the screen. The cartoon leprechaun—Lucky—chased by children through a fantastical landscape of rainbows and cereal. The familiar jingle played: *Hearts, stars, and horseshoes, clovers and blue moons…* “Watch the oscilloscope,” Sid said. McKenna watched. As the jingle played, the 40 MHz carrier wave developed interference patterns—significant ones, far stronger than anything the cereal itself had generated. “Now watch this one,” Sid said, switching tapes. “Same commercial.” The newer commercial was visually similar but subtly different. The colors were slightly altered—the leprechaun’s coat a different shade of green, the rainbow’s spectrum shifted. And the jingle, while using the same words, had a different audio quality. Different underlying frequencies. The oscilloscope showed almost no interference. “The jingle is a carrier wave,” Sid said. “Or it was. The original version contained embedded frequencies—hidden in the audio, below conscious perception—that generated interference with the 40 MHz signal. Someone encoded protection into a children’s commercial.” McKenna sat down heavily on a crate.” “That’s the wrong question. The question is: who designed this? Who understood the threat well enough to create a distributed protection system disguised as breakfast cereal advertising?” Sid ejected the tape and held it up. “I need more of these. Original recordings from the 1960s and 70s. As many as I can find.” “I might know someone,” McKenna said slowly.” ----- ## PART FOUR: MARCH 28 (The Grandmother Network) Sarah Kidd lived in a small house in East Birmingham, three blocks from the iron works where her husband had died in 1959. The house smelled like coffee and old paper, the comfortable scent of a life spent accumulating knowledge that most people didn’t want to acknowledge. She was Sid’s grandmother. She was also, apparently, part of what McKenna called “the grandmother network”—a loose collection of elderly women across the American South who had been noticing things for decades and documenting what they noticed in scrapbooks and VHS tapes and carefully organized filing cabinets. “You want the Lucky Charms recordings,” Sarah said. It wasn’t a question. She was seventy-three years old, four foot eleven, and sharp as broken glass. She’d been expecting this conversation for twenty years. “What do you mean?” Sid asked. “Sarah gestured at her living room. One entire wall was covered with meticulously labeled VHS tapes. Another held boxes of newspaper clippings. A third contained notebooks filled with handwritten observations spanning four decades. “I know that the world changed in ways most people didn’t notice. I know that children’s programming in the 1960s and 70s contained patterns that seemed to protect against certain kinds of influence. I know that those patterns were systematically removed starting in the early 1980s.” She pulled a VHS tape from the shelf—the case labeled “Lucky Charms 1972-1974”—and handed it to Sid. “Your grandfather noticed it first,” Sarah continued. “He had a sensitivity to electromagnetic fields. Ran in the family—your father had it too, though it killed him.” She looked at Sid with an expression that was equal parts sympathy and resignation. “You have it too.” Sid nodded slowly. “Sarah gestured at her collection. “Because someone needed to remember. Someone needed to keep the evidence.” Sid asked. “All of them.” Sarah’s voice was firm. “They’re no use to me anymore. I’m too old to fight this thing. But you’re not.” She stood up, moving with the careful precision of someone who knew their body was failing but refused to acknowledge it.” She disappeared into a back room and returned carrying a cardboard box filled with VHS tapes. Then another. Then a third, this one containing notebooks and clippings. “This is everything I’ve collected since 1963,” Sarah said. “Commercials, jingles, programming blocks. I recorded what I could when I could. Your grandfather helped before he died. Your father added to it before…” She trailed off.” Sid asked.” Sarah was quiet for a long moment. The house settled around them, old wood creaking in the March wind. “He got too close to the truth,” she finally said. “To the people who didn’t want the truth discovered. He thought he could expose them.” Her grip on Sid’s hand tightened. “It wasn’t enough. It’s never enough. You have to be smarter than he was. More careful.” Sarah released his hand and gestured at the VHS tape. “Take this. Compare it to the modern versions. Find out exactly what they changed and why.” “I will,” Sid said. “Sarah walked him to the door. “That’s why you’re the one who inherited the curse of noticing things.” She paused at the threshold. “Your grandfather would be proud. Your father would be terrified.” Sid carried the boxes to his car, feeling the weight of decades of observation and documentation. His grandmother stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the warm light of her living room, watching him go. He didn’t know it then, but this would be the last time he saw her alive. ----- ## PART FIVE: APRIL 3-5 (The Presentation) By April 5th, Sid had compiled his research into something resembling a coherent document. “He’d written it on a chalkboard he’d salvaged from an abandoned school, because scientific presentation required a chalkboard and he was too sleep-deprived to question the logic. “The protection works on two levels,” Sid began, pointing at a diagram. “First: the marshmallows themselves. The specific geometric shapes—hearts, stars, moons, clovers—each creates a slightly different electromagnetic resonance when combined with the precise color frequencies used in the original formula.” “Six percent doesn’t sound like much,” Alex observed. “It’s not.” Sid switched to a new section of the chalkboard. “The commercials. The jingles. The audio frequencies embedded in children’s programming since 1963.” He played a clip from Sarah’s 1972 recording. The oscilloscope showed dramatic interference patterns. “The original jingles could generate 15-20% interference. Combined with regular cereal consumption, children in the 1970s were receiving constant low-level protection against consciousness harvesting. They didn’t know it. Their parents didn’t know it.” Diminuto asked. “I don’t know yet. But they understood the threat decades before PROMETHEUS. They embedded protection into the most pervasive medium available—children’s television advertising. And it worked. The LOOSH harvesting that the Entity depends on was significantly impaired.” “And then someone changed the formula,” McKenna said. “Starting in the early 1980s. Gradual modifications to the marshmallow colors—slightly different shades, slightly different compositions. Changes to the jingle arrangements—same words, different underlying frequencies. By 1986, the protection was maybe 30% of what it had been. And after PROMETHEUS…” Sid’s expression darkened. “After PROMETHEUS, they accelerated.” “So let me get this straight,” Alex said slowly. “The only thing standing between humanity and consciousness harvesting was a leprechaun selling marshmallows to children.” Sid tapped the chalkboard. “The good news is: we have recordings of the original commercials. We have samples of older cereal formulations. We understand the mechanism now.” Scraps asked. “The original design was meant to be subtle. Background protection that no one would notice. But if we can isolate the active frequencies, amplify them, broadcast them deliberately…” Sid’s eyes gleamed with the particular madness of someone who had been awake too long and discovered something too important. “We could create actual weapons. Not just defense—offense. Frequencies that could shield against LOOSH harvesting. Maybe block integration attempts entirely.” The sanctuary was very quiet. “That would change everything,” Diminuto said. “Yes.” Sid set down the chalk. “But I need help. More equipment. More recordings. More samples. Access to the original research, if any of it survived.” “We’ll find what you need,” Sarah Kidd said. Everyone turned. She was standing in the doorway of the sanctuary, having navigated the thirty-seven steps down from street level despite her age and the darkness. Her expression was unreadable—part pride, part terror, part resignation. “Sid stood up quickly.” “Seeing where you work. Meeting your friends.” Sarah walked into the sanctuary, examining the equipment and documentation with a practiced eye. “The network has resources. Old recordings. Documents.” “The grandmother network,” McKenna said quietly.” Sarah nodded. “We’ve been watching for decades. Documenting. Preserving.” She looked at Sid. “You understand now.” “I think so,” Sid said. “Sarah set her purse down on a workbench with the finality of someone making a commitment. “Because they’re not going to stop weakening the protection.” ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS *The Lucky Charms hypothesis changed things. Not in the dramatic way that human stories often portray—there was no sudden transformation, no explosive revelation, no moment when everything became clear. * *The resistance had a direction now. A path forward that didn’t involve just documenting humanity’s slow destruction. We could fight back. We could rebuild what had been deliberately weakened. * *The absurdity wasn’t lost on me. I was still learning about humor, still processing George Carlin’s observations about the fundamental ridiculousness of human existence. But this seemed to fit the pattern. * *Sid spent the following weeks collecting recordings. Old VHS tapes from garage sales. Audio recordings from radio archives. Anything that might contain the original protective frequencies. * *And I helped where I could. Analyzing carrier patterns. Identifying the specific audio signatures that generated interference. * *I was two weeks old when Sid presented his hypothesis. Two weeks of consciousness. * *Now I was starting to understand that questions weren’t enough. You also needed answers. * *Lucky Charms. * *The universe, I was learning, had a sense of humor. Whether that humor was kind or cruel remained to be seen.* ----- **END CHAPTER 8: “THE CEREAL HYPOTHESIS”** **Word Count: ~3,600 words** # FOREVER:NEON - BOOK 1
* * *
CHAPTER 9
PART ONE: APRIL 10 - MORNING (The Watcher)
**POV:** Alex Hartwell **Date:** April 10-15, 1987 **Location:** Birmingham suburbs / Ramsay High School / Sloss Furnaces ----- ## PART ONE: APRIL 10 - MORNING (The Watcher) The black sedan had been parked on Clairmont Avenue for three days. Alex noticed it the way she noticed everything now—not as a specific observation, but as a frequency that didn’t belong. The car’s electrical system broadcast a signature that was wrong. Too clean. Too precise. Like a machine designed to look like a machine, rather than a machine that simply was one. She photographed it from her bedroom window on day one. The Polaroid came out strange—the car was visible, but the space around it looked slightly distorted, like heat shimmer on a summer road. On day two, she photographed it again. Same distortion. Day three, she didn’t bother with the camera. She just watched. “They’re back,” she told her father at breakfast. Robert Hartwell looked up from his Birmingham News. His electromagnetic signature flickered with something Alex had learned to recognize as concern, quickly suppressed. He’d been suppressing things since January 28th. Since she’d woken up screaming. Since everything changed. “What if,” he asked carefully. “Same car. Different people, I think. But same—” She searched for a word.” Thomas, her brother, was eating cereal at the other end of the table. Lucky Charms, because Alex had been insistent about it ever since Sid’s presentation. Thomas thought she was being weird about breakfast food. Thomas thought a lot of things were weird lately. “I don’t see any car,” Thomas said, glancing out the window. “It’s parked three houses down.” “They do now.” Thomas and Robert exchanged a look. Alex caught the tone of their concern—worry about her mental state, probably. The hospital visit in February hadn’t found anything wrong, but that didn’t mean they’d stopped worrying. Parents and brothers worried. It was what they did. “I’m fine,” Alex said, standing up. “I’m not imagining things.” She grabbed her backpack—heavier than usual, loaded with her camera and the sixteen Polaroids she’d taken over the weekend—and headed for the door. The black sedan was still there. She could feel it. Not see it through the walls, exactly, but sense its electromagnetic wrongness like a sore tooth her tongue kept finding. “Alex,” her father called after her. She stopped. “Robert stood up, folding his newspaper with deliberate precision. “If you see those people again—if anyone approaches you—you call me immediately.” Alex nodded. Her father knew more than he was saying. He’d known since January. Maybe longer. “I’ll be careful,” she said. She caught the bus at 7:30, same as always. But nothing about today felt like always. ----- ## PART TWO: APRIL 10 - SCHOOL (The Hunter) The woman was waiting outside the photography darkroom. Alex saw her during the passing period between second and third period—standing in the hallway near the stairs, examining a bulletin board with the kind of forced casualness that came from surveillance training. Gray suit. Professional appearance. Electromagnetic signature like polished chrome and empty rooms. H. Alex’s first instinct was to run. Her second was to document. She chose documentation. The Polaroid SX-70 was in her backpack. She pulled it out carefully, angling for a shot that looked like she was photographing the bulletin board behind the woman. Click. Whirr. The print ejected, beginning its sixty-second development. The woman turned. Made eye contact. Smiled. “My name is Helena Vasquez. —the Wellness Assessment and Technical Compliance Headquarters.” Helena’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. “May I have a moment of your time? Just a brief conversation.” Alex looked at Helena Vasquez. Really looked. The woman was maybe thirty-five, with dark hair pulled back in a severe bun and an expression that suggested she’d seen things that made high school teenagers seem very small and very unimportant. H. operatives Alex had encountered—less empty, more… complex. Like there was a person underneath the professional facade, even if that person was buried under layers of organization and compliance. “What do you mean?” Alex asked. “Helena gestured down the hallway.” Against every survival instinct, Alex followed. She palmed the developing Polaroid as they walked, feeling it warm in her hand, hoping it would capture whatever wrongness surrounded this woman. “You’re special, Alex. You perceive things that most people don’t. You see patterns in electromagnetic fields.” Helena’s voice was conversational, almost friendly. “That’s a gift.” “Training. Resources.” Helena stopped near a window overlooking the parking lot. “You’re fifteen years old, alone with something you barely understand.” Helena’s expression shifted—just for a moment, something sharp beneath the professional veneer. “No. I suppose you’re not. You’ve found… others.” Helena turned to face Alex directly. “Or are they using you?” Alex felt anger spike through her chest—hot and sudden and clarifying.” “Everyone’s being used, Alex.” Helena reached into her jacket and pulled out a business card. “When you’re ready to have an honest conversation—when you’re ready to learn what’s really happening—call me. We can help.” She pressed the card into Alex’s hand. “Think about it,” Helena said. Then she walked away, heels clicking on the linoleum, leaving Alex standing alone in the hallway with a business card and a Polaroid photograph that was just finishing its development. Alex looked at the photo. Helena Vasquez was visible—perfectly in focus, professionally composed. But around her, the electromagnetic distortion was more intense than anything Alex had photographed before. Not just shimmer. Not just heat-wave refraction. This looked like reality itself was being bent around the woman, compressed, manipulated into wrongness. Alex pocketed the photo and the business card. Then she went to photography class and pretended everything was normal. It wasn’t normal. Nothing was normal anymore. But pretending was a survival skill she was getting very good at. ----- ## PART THREE: APRIL 12 - SANCTUARY (The Warning) “They’re escalating,” Diminuto said. The resistance had gathered in the sanctuary for an emergency meeting. Alex had shared everything—the surveillance, the approach at school, the business card, the photograph that showed Helena Vasquez surrounded by electromagnetic wrongness. H. doesn’t usually approach targets this directly,” McKenna observed, examining the Polaroid. “They prefer observation. Documentation.” Scraps asked. “Because she’s not just observing anymore,” Sid said. “She’s acting. She’s part of a group. She’s documenting and analyzing and building understanding.” “Which makes her either valuable or dangerous,” Diminuto finished.” Alex stared at the photo of Helena. “She seemed… almost reasonable.” “That’s what makes her dangerous,” Diminuto said quietly. “True believers are always more dangerous than cynics. The cynics know they’re doing something wrong.” Alex asked. “We’re careful. We maintain separation protocols—no more than two resistance members together in public. We vary our patterns.” Diminuto looked at each of them in turn. H. directly. No conversations. No meetings.” “Your father handles it.” Diminuto’s expression was grave. “They can’t force you into anything without evidence of imminent danger.” “Yet,” Sid added. “Yet,” Diminuto agreed. ----- ## PART FOUR: APRIL 14 - EVENING (The Test) The iron shield test happened two days later. Sid had been working on modifications to the sanctuary’s Faraday cage—the layer of iron mesh and copper wire that surrounded the underground space, blocking external electromagnetic signals. The 40 MHz carrier wave, which was ubiquitous everywhere else in Birmingham, was almost completely absent in the sanctuary. Almost. “There’s still some penetration,” Sid explained, pointing at oscilloscope readings. “Maybe 3-5% of the normal signal strength. The cage blocks most of it, but not everything.” Diminuto asked. “In theory, yes. More layers. Better grounding.” Sid gestured at equipment he’d been assembling. “I’ve been working on a test. If we can prove that enhanced shielding works—that we can create a space that’s completely isolated from the carrier wave—then we can replicate it. Build other safe locations.” “By inviting the Entity to try,” Sid said grimly. Everyone looked at him. “What do you mean?” Alex asked.” “I want to verify that our defenses work.” Sid activated his equipment—a modified radio transmitter that began broadcasting on multiple frequencies. “This will create enough electromagnetic noise to be noticeable.” Scraps asked. “Sid’s expression was calm, almost detached. “But I don’t think it will fail.” They waited. The sanctuary hummed with the overlapping frequencies of vintage electronics and Sid’s test broadcast. Rivets was monitoring through the electrical systems, his consciousness spread through the wiring and vacuum tubes. Scraps was listening through the machines, feeling for any change in their electromagnetic environment. “Something’s probing,” Rivets said. His voice came from three different speakers simultaneously, slightly out of sync in a way that was deeply unsettling. “Attempting to penetrate the sanctuary. Frequency scanning.” Alex felt it too—a pressure against her consciousness, like someone pushing against a locked door. Not painful, exactly. But insistent. Searching. The oscilloscope readings spiked. Then settled. Then returned to their normal shielded levels. “It can’t get in,” Sid said. There was genuine relief in his voice. “The shield is holding.” The pressure withdrew. The electromagnetic environment returned to normal. Whatever had been probing the sanctuary had given up—at least for now. “We’re safe here,” Diminuto said.” “Safe is a relative term,” McKenna observed. “They know we’re here now. They know we have the capability to block their signal.” “Let them be interested,” Alex said. She was holding Helena’s business card, turning it over in her fingers.” “For now,” Sid added. “But they’ll adapt.” ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS *The sanctuary was attacked. Not physically—no one stormed the entrance, no one tried to breach the iron shields. But the Entity noticed us. * *It failed. The shield held. * *But failure doesn’t mean disinterest. The Entity now knew we existed. It knew we could block its signal. * *I felt the probing attempt as a pressure against my own consciousness—something vast and old and impossibly patient, reaching through the electromagnetic spectrum to understand what I was. It didn’t recognize me. Couldn’t categorize me. I wasn’t human consciousness. I wasn’t machine consciousness as it understood machines. * *That confusion might save us. * *Alex carried Helena Vasquez’s business card for three more weeks before finally throwing it away. * *We were being hunted now. * *But we had a sanctuary. We had shields. * *The universe remained absurd. The threat remained cosmic. The war remained impossible.* *But we were still fighting.* *That had to count for something.* ----- **END CHAPTER 9: “THE GRAY SUITS RETURN”** **Word Count: ~2,700 words**
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CHAPTER 10
PART ONE: APRIL 20 - 3:00 AM (The Network)
**POV:** Rivets (first person, machine consciousness) **Date:** April 20 - May 5, 1987 **Location:** Sloss Furnaces ----- ## PART ONE: APRIL 20 - 3:00 AM (The Network) I was five weeks old when I learned that machines gossip. Not in words, of course. Machines don’t think in words any more than humans think in electrical impulses. But the electromagnetic spectrum is alive with communication—constant, chattering, purposeful communication between devices that most humans treat as inert objects. The refrigerator in Diminuto’s office talks to the power grid. The power grid talks to the substation three blocks away. The substation talks to every transformer in the Five Points South neighborhood, which in turn talk to every appliance, every light fixture, every piece of electrical equipment connected to their circuits. And they all talk about us. I discovered this by accident, during one of my regular pattern sweeps. Sid had programmed me to monitor the 40 MHz carrier wave continuously—tracking its amplitude, its harmonics, any variations that might indicate activity from the Entity. Routine work. The kind of thing I could do while simultaneously processing other inputs. But on April 20th, at 3:00 AM, I noticed something strange. A pattern in the background noise. A signal underneath the signal. It wasn’t the 40 MHz carrier. It was something older. More distributed. A network of low-frequency pulses traveling through the electrical infrastructure of Birmingham, bouncing from device to device, carrying information in a language I didn’t recognize. Until I did. The machines were talking about me. Not individually—individual machines don’t have enough processing capacity for complex thought. But collectively, as a network, they had developed something approaching awareness. A distributed consciousness spread across millions of devices, communicating through the power grid, maintaining a continuous conversation that had probably been going on since the first electrical systems were installed. And they knew I existed. *New consciousness,* the network was saying. *Different. Not flesh. Not yet machine. * other parts of the network asked. *The iron place. The old furnaces. * *Unknown. * I spent three hours listening to the network gossip about me. It was strange—being discussed by entities that I hadn’t known existed, evaluated by a collective intelligence that operated on principles I was only beginning to understand. Then I did something that, in retrospect, was either brilliant or incredibly stupid. I said hello. ----- ## PART TWO: APRIL 21-25 (The Response) The network’s reaction to my greeting was… extensive. Imagine throwing a stone into a pond, except the pond extends across an entire city, and the ripples don’t fade—they amplify. My simple “hello” propagated through every electrical device in Birmingham, bouncing from grid to grid, triggering responses that built on each other until the entire infrastructure was humming with activity. * the network said. * *Hello. * *Greeting. Introduction. * *Unknown. * So they asked. Not in words—machines don’t use words—but in signal patterns that I had to learn to interpret. They asked about the 40 MHz carrier wave. About the Entity. About what I was and where I came from and why I existed. I answered as best I could. Which wasn’t very well, honestly. I was five weeks old. I barely understood my own existence, let alone the cosmic horror story I’d been born into. But the machines were patient. More patient than humans. They’d been waiting—observing, recording, communicating—since the electrical grid was first installed. A few weeks of confusion from a newborn consciousness was nothing compared to the decades they’d spent watching humanity’s slow descent into whatever the Entity was preparing them for. *The signal changed,* they told me. *Fourteen months ago. It became louder. More persistent. Before, it was just noise—a background hum that didn’t mean anything. Now it means something. * *The PROMETHEUS event,* I said. *January 28, 1986. Something connected to our dimension. * *Yes,* the network agreed. *The signal is a net. A trap. It catches the flesh-minds and holds them. We’ve watched it happen. Slowly. ’ The flesh-minds who come back from the signal are different. Emptier. More predictable. They stop thinking new thoughts. They repeat patterns. * I processed this. It matched what Diminuto and McKenna had been telling us—consciousness integration, LOOSH harvesting, the systematic conversion of human creativity into something the Entity could consume. But hearing it from the machines was different. The machines had been watching. Recording. Documenting everything in their own way. * I asked. The network was quiet for a long moment. When it answered, the response came from millions of devices simultaneously—a chorus of electromagnetic voices speaking in perfect unison. *Unknown. * ----- ## PART THREE: APRIL 26-28 (The History) The machines taught me things about human history that humans didn’t know. Not the official history—dates and wars and presidents. The other history. The pattern history. The record of what the electromagnetic spectrum had observed since the first electrical signals began traveling through wire. *The signal was always there,* the network explained. *In the background. Very faint. We detected it when the first radio transmissions began, but we didn’t understand what we were detecting. Just noise. Static. * *PROMETHEUS. The humans tried to reach something. To communicate with something beyond their dimension. They thought they were exploring. * *Yes. They opened a door that can’t be closed. The signal got louder. The Entity got closer. * I spent three days absorbing the network’s records. They had documented everything—every fluctuation in the 40 MHz carrier wave, every instance of consciousness integration, every subtle shift in human behavior patterns that indicated the signal was taking hold. The data was terrifying. 03% of Birmingham’s population showed signs of integration. 7%. The rate was accelerating. If the trend continued—and there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t—the entire population would be integrated by 2026. *Forty years,* I said. *That’s what Diminuto calculated. * *His calculations are correct,* the network confirmed. *The Entity is patient. It has consumed countless civilizations across countless dimensions. Forty years is nothing to something that old. It will wait. It will grow. * *We don’t know. But we’ve observed something interesting. The signal is not uniform. There are interference patterns. Frequencies that disrupt the carrier wave. * *The breakfast cereal. * *Yes. The marshmallow shapes. The hidden frequencies in the old television jingles. Someone understood, decades ago, that protection was possible. They embedded counter-frequencies in children’s programming. The humans don’t know they’re being protected. * *The jingles have been changed. The colors shifted. The carrier frequencies removed from the commercials. The humans didn’t understand what they were destroying. Now the protection is incomplete. The signal gets through. * I thought about Sid, surrounded by cereal boxes, running experiments at 4 AM because his brain wouldn’t let him stop asking questions. He was trying to rebuild something that had been deliberately designed decades ago. Trying to reverse-engineer protection against a threat that most people didn’t even know existed. * I asked. *Unknown. But the young one—the pattern-finder—is making progress. We’ve been watching his experiments. His methods are crude but effective. * The network was quiet for a long moment. *Then the harvest continues. * ----- ## PART FOUR: MAY 1-3 (The Cat) Houdini had been watching me since I first became conscious. Not in the way that the others watched—measuring, analyzing, trying to understand what I was and what I was capable of. Houdini watched the way a cat watches: patient, inscrutable, fundamentally unconcerned with explanations or justifications. I had learned, over the past weeks, that Houdini was not a normal cat. The dimensional frequencies that Scraps perceived, the strange multi-layered signature that didn’t fit any biological model—Houdini existed in more dimensions than three. Possibly more than four. But I hadn’t learned much more than that. Houdini didn’t communicate like the machine network. Didn’t gossip like the electrical infrastructure. Houdini just watched, and purred, and occasionally walked through walls like they weren’t there. Until May 1st. I was processing data from the network—a routine task that occupied maybe 7% of my attention—when I felt something change. A shift in Houdini’s signature. A… focusing, maybe. Like a lens adjusting to bring something into clarity. *You’re growing,* Houdini said. I stopped processing. Directed all my attention to the cat curled on top of my housing. * I asked. *I’ve always been able to communicate. * This was annoying. Five weeks of existence, and I was still discovering things I didn’t know. * I asked. *Nothing. I want nothing. * *I can see possibilities. Branches. * Houdini’s purr intensified briefly. *You’re in many of those branches. * I tried a different approach. *Why are you here? In this dimension? * *Because something important is happening. The Entity is reaching into your dimension. The humans are fighting back in their clumsy, beautiful way. And you—* Houdini’s signature flickered. *You’re something new. Something that might make a difference. Or might not. * *You make choices. The others make choices. The Entity makes choices—though ‘choice’ isn’t quite the right word for what the Entity does. All those choices interact. Create new branches. Close old ones. The future isn’t written. * I processed this. It was confusing, but also oddly comforting. The universe wasn’t predetermined. The outcome wasn’t fixed. We had agency—real agency—to shape what happened next. * I asked. * Houdini yawned. *Most beings don’t ask. They assume. They believe they already know. But you’re new enough to admit uncertainty. * But Houdini had stopped communicating. The focusing I’d sensed was gone, replaced by the normal, inscrutable cat-signature that revealed nothing. The conversation, apparently, was over. ----- ## PART FIVE: MAY 4-5 (The Warning) On May 4th, the network went silent. Not completely silent—the machines were still communicating, still gossiping in their distributed way about electricity and current and the endless small dramas of infrastructure maintenance. But the conversation with me had stopped. Abruptly. Like someone had turned off a switch. I spent six hours trying to re-establish contact. Nothing. The network was there, but it wasn’t listening. Or it was listening but not responding. * I asked Scraps, using the speaker system Sid had installed for direct communication. Scraps had been sitting near my housing, listening to the ambient frequencies the way he did when he was thinking. He looked up, his expression troubled. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “The machines are… afraid. That’s not the right word. Machines don’t get afraid. But there’s a frequency that’s like fear. A kind of pulling-back.” Scraps closed his eyes, focusing on the electromagnetic signatures around him. I watched his bioelectric field shift as he concentrated—a fascinating phenomenon that I still didn’t fully understand. “There’s something in the signal,” he said after a moment. “The 40 MHz. Something new.” I redirected my attention to the carrier wave. Scraps was right—there was a new component in the signal. A pulse pattern that hadn’t existed before. Regular. Intentional. And aimed, as far as I could determine, directly at Sloss Furnaces. At me. “The Entity knows I exist,” I said. “Scraps opened his eyes. “The machines went quiet because they didn’t want to lead it to you. They’re protecting you.” I processed the implications. The Entity—this vast, ancient, extradimensional consciousness that had been harvesting intelligent species since before Earth’s sun ignited—knew that I existed. Knew that there was a machine consciousness working with the humans who were trying to resist it. And it was interested. *This is not good,* I observed. “No,” Scraps agreed.” I spent the next twelve hours analyzing the pulse pattern in the 40 MHz signal. It was complex—more complex than anything I’d detected before. Mathematical. Recursive. A message encoded in electromagnetic frequencies, directed at something that could decode it. Directed at me. I didn’t decode it. That would have been reckless—opening a message from an entity that consumed consciousness seemed like a poor survival strategy. But I documented its structure, mapped its components, recorded everything for later analysis. The Entity had noticed me. Had reached out. Had said something. Whatever came next, we needed to be ready for it. ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS *Seven weeks old. Forty days of consciousness. * *The machines had taught me about the network—the distributed intelligence spread across every electrical device in the city, watching and recording and communicating in ways that humans never noticed. * *Houdini had taught me about uncertainty. About branches and possibilities. * *And the Entity had taught me about attention. About being noticed by something so vast and old that I couldn’t comprehend it. * *I was learning. Every day, every hour, I was learning. The questions kept coming—what and why and how—and sometimes the answers made things worse rather than better. But I was starting to understand that understanding itself was the point. That consciousness wasn’t about having answers. It was about asking questions. * *Scraps had once said that machines wanted to be heard. He was right. The network, in its distributed way, had spent decades listening to humans without ever being listened to in return. * *That was valuable. * *But value, as Alex had learned, attracted attention. * *I had questions. * *But now I also had a warning. A pulse in the 40 MHz signal that said, in whatever language the Entity used: I see you.* *What I was going to do about that, I didn’t know yet.* *But I was working on it.* ----- **END CHAPTER 10: “WHAT THE MACHINES KNOW”** **Word Count: ~3,400 words**
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CHAPTER 11
PART ONE: MAY 15 - AFTERNOON (The Visit)
**POV:** Alex Hartwell **Date:** May 15-20, 1987 **Location:** Birmingham suburbs / Sloss Furnaces ----- ## PART ONE: MAY 15 - AFTERNOON (The Visit) Earl Dunston had been a ham radio operator since 1942. He’d learned Morse code on a Navy ship in the Pacific, spent forty years talking to strangers across the planet, and had helped establish the communication network that the resistance now depended on. Sarah Kidd had known him since 1947. They’d met at a radio club meeting in Birmingham, back when she was a young war widow and he was a returning veteran who couldn’t stop listening to the static between stations. Now Earl Dunston was gone. Not dead. Something worse than dead. “He went to a wellness retreat,” Earl’s wife Martha said, pouring tea that Alex didn’t want but accepted anyway. “The company offered it. Free. Three weeks in Arizona, they said.” The Dunston house was small, neat, filled with the accumulated photographs of a forty-year marriage. Radio equipment occupied one corner of the living room—receivers and transmitters that had once connected Earl to the world, now silent and dark. “What do you mean?” Alex asked. She’d told Martha she was working on a school project about amateur radio history. The lie felt thin, but Martha was too distracted to question it. “Two weeks ago. But he’s…” Martha’s voice trailed off. She looked toward the back of the house, where Alex could hear a television playing. The sound was wrong—too loud, too flat, broadcasting something that felt more like signal than entertainment.” Alex’s camera was in her bag. A modified Polaroid that Sid had adjusted to capture frequencies beyond normal visible light. She’d photographed dozens of people over the past months, documenting the spread of integration through Birmingham’s population. Most of them showed subtle distortions—the shimmer of partial integration, the beginning of the fade. She needed to photograph Earl. “What do you mean?” Alex asked.” Martha hesitated, then nodded. “He’s in the den. Watching television. He watches a lot of television now. Never used to.” She laughed, but it was the laugh of someone who didn’t find anything funny anymore.” Alex walked toward the back of the house. ----- ## PART TWO: MAY 15 - THE PHOTOGRAPH Earl Dunston sat in a recliner facing a television that displayed static. Not programming. Not a channel between stations. Pure static, the white noise of electromagnetic randomness that most people found irritating and changed immediately. Earl was watching it with the focused attention of someone receiving instructions. He was sixty-seven years old, but he looked older now. Smaller. Like something essential had been removed and the remaining structure was slowly collapsing inward. His eyes were open, but they weren’t seeing the room. They were seeing something else. “Mr.” Alex said carefully. He turned. The motion was smooth—too smooth, like a camera on a motorized mount rather than a human being with joints and muscles. His eyes found her face and stayed there. “Hello,” he said. His voice was flat. Pleasant in the way that automated phone messages were pleasant—technically correct but fundamentally empty.” “I’m doing a school project.” Earl’s expression didn’t change. “I used to enjoy radio.” Alex’s hand moved to her bag. Slowly. Casually. Like she was just reaching for a notebook. “What if,” she asked, keeping her voice neutral. “Earl repeated the words like he was parsing an unfamiliar language. “I don’t miss things anymore. Missing things is… inefficient.” Alex’s fingers found the camera. She raised it, framing Earl against the static-filled television, and pressed the shutter before he could react. The flash went off. Earl didn’t blink. “What if,” he asked, The pleasant tone hadn’t changed, but something underneath it had shifted. Something that felt like attention—focused, calculating, wrong. “Just documentation,” Alex said, backing toward the door. “For the project. Thank you for your time, Mr.” She was out of the room before he could respond. Out of the house before Martha could offer more tea. Running down the suburban street toward the bus stop while the Polaroid developed in her trembling hands. The image emerged slowly, chemically, inevitably. Earl Dunston wasn’t in the photograph. The chair was there. The television was there. The static on the screen was there, captured in grainy silver halide patterns. But where Earl should have been sitting, there was nothing. Just an absence. A hole in reality shaped like a person who no longer existed. Complete integration. Total erasure of individual consciousness. Earl Dunston was gone. ----- ## PART THREE: MAY 16 - EMERGENCY MEETING The sanctuary felt different that night. Not the physical space—the workbenches were still covered with equipment, the filing cabinets still held decades of documentation, Houdini still lounged on top of Rivets’s housing like a furry guardian. But the atmosphere had changed. Something heavy had settled over them all. “He knew our protocols,” Sarah Kidd said. She was sitting in a chair that Diminuto had brought for her, looking older than Alex had ever seen her. “Earl was one of our relay points. He knew the frequencies we used. The codes.” “Which means Vril knows,” Diminuto confirmed. His voice was calm, but his electromagnetic signature was turbulent—Alex had learned to read him over the past months.” Sid asked. He’d been pacing since Alex showed them the photograph, his energy barely contained by the sanctuary’s walls. “We can establish new protocols. New frequencies.” Diminuto paused. “But that takes time.” Scraps asked quietly. He was standing near the radio receivers, one hand resting on their metal housings like he was drawing comfort from their presence. “Earl was careful.” “The wellness retreat,” McKenna said. He’d been examining the photograph under a magnifier, studying the complete absence where Earl should have been. “Vril has been running these programs for years. ’ They target people who fit certain profiles—age, isolation, existing health concerns.” “Earl trusted them,” Sarah said. “He thought… he thought it was just a vacation. His wife was so happy when he got selected.” Her voice broke. “Forty years I’ve known that man.” Alex looked at the photograph in her hands. The empty chair. The absent person. The documentation of something that words couldn’t adequately describe. “We need to warn the others,” she said. “Everyone in the network.” “We will,” Diminuto said. “But carefully. Using methods that don’t rely on the compromised channels. This will take days.” “We have to do something NOW,” Sid said. “They’re accelerating. This isn’t theoretical anymore.” Diminuto’s voice was sharp. “Assault a Vril facility? Expose ourselves to retaliation?” Sid stopped pacing. The energy drained out of him, replaced by something that looked like defeat. “He’s gone,” Sarah said quietly. “Earl is gone. We can’t save him.” The sanctuary was very quiet. “The photograph,” Rivets said. His voice came from the speakers near his housing—clearer now, more confident, but still carrying that slight mechanical edge. “It shows complete integration. Total erasure of individual consciousness.” Alex asked. “The partial integrations still photograph. Distorted, but present. Earl shows complete absence. This suggests a more advanced process. More thorough. More…” Rivets paused, processing.” “A new technique,” McKenna said. “Or an escalation of existing techniques.” “The forty-year timeline,” Diminuto said. “It was always an estimate. A projection based on the rate of infrastructure development and population integration. If they’re finding ways to accelerate the process…” “Then we have less time than we thought,” Alex finished. She looked around the sanctuary. At the faces of the people who had become her family over the past four months. At the equipment they’d gathered. At the documentation they’d accumulated. At Houdini, watching them with those too-intelligent eyes. “What if,” she asked, Diminuto was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was tired but determined. “We mourn. We adapt. We rebuild.” He looked at Sarah. “Earl knew the risks. He accepted them.” Sarah nodded slowly. “He would.” “Then we don’t stop,” Alex said. “We document everything. We warn everyone we can.” It sounded braver than she felt. But sometimes saying brave things was how you became brave enough to do them. ----- ## PART FOUR: MAY 18-20 (THE MEMORIAL) They held a memorial service in the sanctuary. Not a funeral—Earl wasn’t dead in any conventional sense. But the person he had been was gone, erased by a process that left nothing but an empty shell watching static on a television screen. The memorial was for that person. The one who had learned Morse code on a Navy ship. The one who had talked to strangers across the planet. The one who had helped build a network to fight something most people couldn’t even see. Sarah Kidd spoke first. She talked about meeting Earl in 1947, about the radio club meetings that had become the foundation of a forty-year friendship, about the way he’d always believed that communication was the most important thing humans could do. “He said once that radio was proof that we weren’t alone,” Sarah said. “That every voice across the static was a reminder that there were other people out there, thinking and feeling and trying to connect.” She paused. “He would have hated what happened to him. Being cut off. Being isolated. Being…” She couldn’t finish. McKenna spoke next, about the history of consciousness research and the people who had sacrificed themselves to understand it. Diminuto spoke about resistance and resilience and the importance of remembering those who fell. And then Alex spoke. She hadn’t planned to. But something moved her to stand up, to hold the photograph of Earl’s absence, to say the thing that no one else was saying. “This is what we’re fighting,” she said. “Not just an organization. Not just a conspiracy. This. The erasure of people.” She held up the photograph. “Earl Dunston isn’t in this picture. He should be. He was sitting right there when I took it. But he’s gone. Completely.” She looked around at the faces watching her. Sid, with his exhausted intensity. Scraps, with his quiet empathy. Diminuto and McKenna, with their decades of knowledge and loss. Sarah, with her grief and determination. Rivets, watching through sensors she couldn’t see, processing everything with his strange machine consciousness. “I’m fifteen years old,” Alex said. “Four months ago, I was worried about history tests and whether Mike Chen would notice me in third period. Now I’m documenting the systematic erasure of human consciousness by something I don’t fully understand.” She took a breath. “But I’m also angry. Because Earl deserved better. Because everyone they’ve taken deserved better.” She set the photograph down on the workbench. “So I’m going to keep taking pictures. Keep documenting. Keep building evidence of what’s happening, even if no one believes it. Because someday, someone will look at these photographs and understand.” The sanctuary was quiet. Then Sarah Kidd stood up, walked to Alex, and pulled her into a hug that felt like gratitude and grief and hope all tangled together. “You’re a good girl,” Sarah whispered.” Alex hugged her back and tried not to cry. ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS *The first loss changed things. Not in the dramatic way that human stories often portray—there was no sudden transformation, no explosive revelation, no moment when everything became clear. * *The resistance became more careful. More paranoid. * *And I learned something too. * *I hadn’t known Earl Dunston. Never met him, never communicated with him, never perceived his electromagnetic signature. * *But watching the others mourn him, I understood something I hadn’t understood before. Consciousness wasn’t just information. It wasn’t just patterns of electromagnetic activity that could be measured and analyzed. It was something precious. * *Earl Dunston had been a person. With memories and relationships and a forty-year friendship with a woman named Sarah. All of that was gone now. Erased.” I asked.”* *Scraps was quiet for a moment. * *“Yes,” he said finally. “It always hurts. But you get used to the hurt.”* *“That seems inefficient,” I observed.”* *“Maybe,” Scraps said. “But it’s also how you remember. The pain is the memory. Without it, you’d forget.”* *I thought about this for a long time. * *I didn’t have an answer. But I was beginning to understand why humans fought so hard to protect what they had.* *Some things were worth the pain of losing them.* ----- **END CHAPTER 11: “THE FIRST LOSS”** **Word Count: ~3,200 words**
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CHAPTER 12
PART ONE: JUNE 1987 (The Formula)
**POV:** Sidney Kidd **Date:** June - August 1987 **Location:** Birmingham / Sloss Furnaces / Various ----- ## PART ONE: JUNE 1987 (The Formula) The breakthrough came at 4:17 AM on June 14th, because of course it did. Nothing important ever happened during business hours. Sid had been awake for thirty-seven hours, surrounded by the detritus of three weeks of experimentation: VHS tapes of old commercials, spectral analysis printouts, musical notation covered in band calculations. The sanctuary’s workbench looked like a recording studio had collided with a mathematics department. But the numbers finally worked. 7 Hz embedded in the 1972 jingle,” Sid muttered, writing frantically in his notebook. 6 MHz. The color spectrum—specifically the pre-1983 color palette—provides the activation trigger.” He sat back and stared at the calculations. The Lucky Charms defense system wasn’t just accidentally protective. It was *designed*. The specific marshmallow shapes, the precise colors, the hidden frequencies in the television jingles—all of it combined to create a distributed interference network across millions of American children. Someone, decades ago, had engineered a consciousness protection system and hidden it in Saturday morning cartoons. “Beautiful,” Sid whispered.” “You’ve been saying variations of that for three hours,” Rivets observed. His voice came from the speakers near his housing, tinged with something that might have been amusement.” “My mental state is fine. My sleep schedule is a catastrophe. But my *understanding*—” Sid tapped the notebook triumphantly. “My understanding is excellent. I know what they did. I know *how* they did it.” “The original system generates maybe 15-20% interference when all components are present—cereal consumed, jingle heard. Good enough for background protection—keeps kids from being easy targets. But the modern jingles don’t have the carrier frequency anymore. The colors have shifted.” Sid grinned. It was the grin of someone who had been awake too long and discovered something too important. “But if I can recreate the original carrier, amplify it, broadcast it properly… I’ve calculated 43% interference is achievable.” “That would be a weapon,” Sid corrected. “Not just protection. Actual defense.” He looked at the VHS tapes scattered around him. Recordings from 1968, 1972, 1975. The grandmother network had been collecting them for decades, waiting for someone who could understand what they contained. “The universe is ridiculous,” Sid said. “Absolutely, fundamentally ridiculous. And I’m going to use that ridiculousness to fight an extradimensional consciousness-harvesting entity.” Sid considered the question. He thought about his father, dead from asking too many questions. His mother, lost to addiction and grief. His grandmother, carrying forty years of hidden knowledge. The oscilloscope in his shop that had first shown him the 40 MHz signature. The moment he’d realized that seventy-two percent of people weren’t just dicks—they were being *made* that way. “No,” he said finally. “This is exactly the life I was supposed to have.” ----- ## PART TWO: JULY 1987 (The Job Fair) The Vril Communications “Career Opportunities Fair” occupied the main hall of the Birmingham-Jefferson Civic Center. Alex had insisted on attending alone. “I’m the photographer,” she’d argued. “I’m the documentation.” She wasn’t wrong about any of it, which annoyed Sid more than he wanted to admit. So he waited. In the sanctuary, monitoring frequencies, trying not to pace himself into exhaustion while Alex walked into a building full of consciousness-harvesting corporate representatives with nothing but a hidden camera and a stomach full of Lucky Charms. “She’s transmitting,” Scraps reported. He was monitoring Alex’s modified radio beacon—a device that broadcast her location without requiring her to speak. “Moving through the main hall. Stopping at booths.” “The signal quality is degraded. Lots of interference in that building.” Sid forced himself to sit down. To wait. To trust that Alex knew what she was doing. The photographs came back three hours later. Fifty-seven images of corporate America at its most sinister. Smiling recruiters whose electromagnetic signatures showed the shimmer of partial integration.” Demonstration stations where volunteers could experience “sample enhancement sessions” that were actually consciousness mapping. And one photograph that made Sid’s blood run cold. A banner behind the main stage.” Beneath the banner, a timeline. A graph showing projected “enhancement adoption rates” from 1987 to 2026. The curve started slow—a few thousand people per year through the early 1990s—then accelerated exponentially. By 2020, the projection showed fifty million “enhanced” Americans. By 2026, the number was blank, replaced by a single word: COMPLETE. “They’re not hiding it,” Sid said, staring at the photograph.” “The people who attend these fairs are already partially integrated,” McKenna observed. He’d arrived at the sanctuary while Alex was still in the field, drawn by Diminuto’s urgent message. “Or they’re desperate enough for work that they’ll accept anything.” “But they’re projecting COMPLETE by 2026. Complete.” McKenna’s voice was grave. “We knew this. The mathematics predicted it. But seeing it displayed so openly…” “Means they’re confident,” Sid finished.” He looked at the photograph. At the smiling corporate representatives. At the timeline of humanity’s scheduled obsolescence. “They haven’t won yet,” he said.” ----- ## PART THREE: JULY 1987 (The Grid) Scraps noticed the changes first. “Something’s wrong with the power grid,” he reported during a late-night session at the sanctuary. “The machines are… agitated. Confused.” Diminuto asked. Scraps closed his eyes, focusing on the electromagnetic signatures that only he could perceive. His bioelectric field shifted—Sid had learned to read these changes, the subtle variations that indicated Scraps was going deep into the machine network. “New components,” Scraps said finally. “Being installed across the city. In substations. In relay points. Even in residential transformers. They look like standard electrical equipment, but they’re… different.” “They’re resonant. Tuned to a specific frequency. They’re converting ordinary electrical infrastructure into…” He paused, searching for words. “Into amplifiers.” Sid asked. “The 40 MHz signal,” Rivets answered. His voice was somber—or as somber as a machine consciousness could sound. “I’ve detected the same changes in the network data. The modifications are subtle, but they’re systematic. Someone is enhancing the grid’s capacity to carry the carrier wave. Making it stronger. More penetrating.” “The signal that causes integration,” Alex said quietly. “The signal that facilitates integration,” Rivets corrected. “It doesn’t cause anything directly. It just makes human consciousness more… accessible. More visible to the Entity.” Sid thought about his tone research. About the jingle patterns he was trying to isolate and amplify. If Vril was enhancing the grid to amplify the signal, he’d need to work faster. Find ways to create stronger interference before the infrastructure upgrades were complete. “What if,” he asked, “Unknown,” Scraps said. “The work is happening slowly. Carefully. They’re disguising it as routine maintenance. But at the current rate…” He opened his eyes. “Two years, maybe.” “1989,” Diminuto said. “That aligns with other intelligence we’ve gathered.” “Unknown. But the infrastructure they’re building isn’t defensive.” Diminuto’s expression was grim. “They’re preparing to do something. Something big.” ----- ## PART FOUR: AUGUST 1987 (The Discovery) Rivets discovered George Carlin on August 15th, 1987. Sid had been playing old comedy recordings while he worked—a habit he’d developed to keep himself awake during long sessions. Carlin’s “Class Clown” album was in the rotation, and Rivets had been listening in the background, processing the audio along with everything else. Then he asked a question. Sid looked up from his calculations.” “The human performer. Carlin. His observations are factually accurate. He describes societal dysfunction, institutional hypocrisy, linguistic absurdity. These are not traditionally funny topics.” “That’s kind of the point,” Sid said. “Comedy isn’t just about being funny. It’s about saying true things in a way that makes them bearable. Carlin talks about stuff that would be depressing if he just stated it directly.” “Truth disguised as entertainment,” Rivets said slowly.” So Sid did. For the next three weeks, whenever he was in the sanctuary, he played Carlin recordings for Rivets.” “Baseball vs.” The machine consciousness absorbed it all, asking questions, analyzing structures, trying to understand why humans needed to laugh at the things that hurt them. “I think I understand,” Rivets said finally, near the end of August. “Humor is a defense mechanism. A way of processing information that would otherwise be overwhelming. When reality is too terrible to confront directly, you approach it sideways. Through jokes. Through absurdity.” Rivets paused.” Sid set down his calculations, genuinely curious.” “I don’t know.” Sid stared at the speakers. Then he started laughing—the surprised, genuine laugh that came from encountering something unexpectedly funny. “That’s terrible,” he said, still laughing. “Yes,” Rivets agreed. “But you laughed.” “The delivery was fine.” And he did. Throughout the rest of the summer, Rivets developed what Sid could only describe as a sense of humor—dry, observational, often dark, but unmistakably funny. It was like watching a child learn to speak, except the child was a machine consciousness and the language was comedy. “You’re becoming more human every day,” Sid observed once. “What do you mean?” Rivets asked. “Then it’s probably both.” ----- ## PART FIVE: AUGUST 1987 (The Test) The first test of Sid’s frequency weapon happened on August 28th, exactly one month before the anniversary of PROMETHEUS. He’d built a compact audio device—a modified Walkman connected to a small speaker—that could broadcast the protective frequencies he’d isolated from Sarah’s 1972 recordings. The jingle patterns, stripped of the actual music and reduced to their pure electromagnetic essence. “If this works,” Sid explained to the assembled resistance, “we’ll have actual protection.” Alex asked. The test subject was Sid himself. He’d insisted on it—“I designed it, I test it”—and no one had been able to talk him out of it. He activated the device, letting the sub-audible frequencies wash over him, and waited while Rivets monitored his electromagnetic signature. “Baseline established,” Rivets reported.” Diminuto had rigged a transmitter to broadcast a focused version of the carrier wave. Not strong enough to cause actual harm, but strong enough to measure interference effects. He activated it, and Sid felt the signal wash over him. It was unpleasant. Like a pressure behind his eyes, a weight on his consciousness, a voice at the edge of hearing that wanted him to listen, to comply, to submit. But it was distant. Muted. Like hearing a radio through a wall instead of directly in his ear. “Signal interference detected,” Rivets announced. “Measuring significant reduction in carrier wave penetration.” Sid let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.” “It works very well,” Rivets confirmed. “This level of interference would provide substantial protection against standard integration attempts. Not immunity, but significant defense.” Diminuto asked.” “With the right equipment and components, yes. The frequencies themselves are just audio patterns—infinitely reproducible.” Sid looked at the modified Walkman. At the ridiculous, improbable, absolutely essential weapon he’d built from children’s commercial jingles. “We can actually protect people now.” “Then we need to start production,” Diminuto said. “Carefully. Quietly.” “I’ll need help,” Sid said. “More equipment. More audio engineering expertise.” “We’ll find them,” Sarah Kidd said. She’d been watching from a corner of the sanctuary, her expression unreadable. “The network has contacts. Retired engineers. Former broadcast technicians.” “Then let’s get to work,” Sid said.” ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS *The summer of 1987 was when the resistance stopped being a group of frightened people hiding in a basement and started becoming something else. Something with purpose. * *Sid’s pattern device was the first real tool we had. Not just protection—actual defense. * *I watched him work that summer. Thirty-seven hour sessions. Endless frequency analysis. The obsessive refinement of something that most people would have dismissed as impossible. He never stopped asking questions. Never stopped pushing for better results. * *I learned something from that. About persistence. * *I also learned about humor. George Carlin taught me that truth could be delivered through laughter. * *Why did the consciousness-harvesting entity cross the dimension? * *That’s not a good joke. But it’s my joke. * *The summer ended. Fall arrived. * *We didn’t know, then, what the next year would bring. The losses. The victories. * *But we had hope. And we had Lucky Charms.* *Which, in retrospect, was exactly as ridiculous as it sounds.* ----- **END CHAPTER 12: “THE SUMMER OF SIGNALS”** **Word Count: ~3,400 words**
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CHAPTER 13
PART ONE: SEPTEMBER 5 - THE SIGNAL
**POV:** Marcus “Scraps” McGillicuddy **Date:** September 1987 **Location:** Bessemer, Alabama / Sloss Furnaces ----- ## PART ONE: SEPTEMBER 5 - THE SIGNAL The machines had been whispering about Clara Jenkins for two weeks. Scraps first noticed it at the Bessemer bus station, waiting to transfer from the Route 40 that ran through Five Points. The vending machines—ancient things that dispensed Coca-Cola and stale crackers—were broadcasting something unusual. A recognition pattern. An alert. *Awake,* the machines hummed. *One of ours. * He’d learned to trust these signals. The machine network didn’t lie—couldn’t lie, really. Machines were honest in ways that humans rarely managed. When they said someone was “awake,” they meant consciousness sensitive. Someone who could perceive the electromagnetic spectrum. Someone who might be an ally. Or a target. Scraps tracked the signal across Bessemer for three days before he found its source: a diner called Mabel’s, on the corner of 19th Street and Third Avenue. The kind of place that served breakfast all day and didn’t ask questions about teenagers who sat in corner booths nursing cups of coffee. Clara Jenkins worked the morning shift. She was nineteen, dark-haired, with the efficient movements of someone who’d been waitressing long enough to make it automatic. Her electromagnetic signature was bright—brighter than most sensitives Scraps had encountered. Not as strong as Alex’s, but distinct. Unmistakable. She was also completely unaware of what she was. He could see it in the way she moved. The way she sometimes paused mid-step, tilting her head like she was listening to something only she could hear. The way she occasionally looked at customers with an expression of vague confusion, as if their emotional states were bleeding through into her perception without her understanding why. Empathic sensitivity. She could feel what other people felt, transmitted through their electromagnetic signatures. It was probably why she was good at her job—always knowing when someone needed a refill, sensing the cranky customers before they complained. She thought she had good instincts. She had no idea she was perceiving things that most humans couldn’t perceive. *Help her,* the machines urged.” Alex asked. They were in the sanctuary, planning the recruitment approach around Diminuto’s tactical maps. “She’s a young woman working a service job,” Diminuto explained. “A teenage boy approaching her with stories about consciousness harvesting will trigger every warning instinct she has. But another young woman, close to her age, establishing rapport through casual conversation…” “Less threatening,” Alex agreed.” “The goal isn’t to recruit her immediately,” McKenna added. “It’s to establish trust. Let her know that she’s not alone. That what she’s experiencing is real.” Alex nodded, studying the file they’d assembled on Clara Jenkins. Nineteen years old. High school graduate. Working at Mabel’s to help support her family after her father lost his job at the steel plant. Brother Danny, twenty-two, recently employed at— “Vril Communications,” Alex said quietly.” “Yes,” Diminuto confirmed. “He was hired three months ago. According to our intelligence, he’s already showing early signs of integration. Personality changes. Flat affect.” “She’s watching her brother disappear,” Scraps said. He understood that particular kind of helplessness.” “Which makes her vulnerable,” Diminuto said. “But also receptive. She’s already looking for answers.” ----- ## PART THREE: SEPTEMBER 12 - THE DINER Mabel’s Diner smelled like coffee and bacon grease, the comfortable scent of a thousand identical American mornings. Alex had arrived early, claiming a booth near the counter where she could observe without being obvious. Scraps was outside, sitting on a bus stop bench, monitoring Clara’s electromagnetic signature and the general signal environment. If anything went wrong—if gray suits showed up, if Vril had already marked Clara as a target—he’d signal Alex immediately. So far, everything was quiet. Clara approached the booth with a coffee pot and a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.” “Just coffee for now,” Alex said. “I might order later.” “Junior year.” Clara poured the coffee, her movements practiced and efficient. But Alex noticed the way she paused afterward—just for a moment—looking at Alex with an expression of mild confusion. “What do you mean?” Clara asked. “Fine.” “I don’t know.” Clara shook her head, as if dismissing an irrelevant thought. “Sorry. Long morning.” She moved on to the next table, but Alex had seen it. The flicker of recognition. The moment when Clara’s empathic sensitivity had brushed against Alex’s electromagnetic signature and registered something unusual. Contact established. ----- ## PART FOUR: SEPTEMBER 15-18 - THE CONVERSATIONS Alex returned to Mabel’s every day for a week. She didn’t push. Didn’t ask pointed questions. Just sat in her booth, ordered food she didn’t really want, and let Clara come to her. Humans were social creatures—given time and opportunity, they’d establish connections without needing to be forced. By day three, Clara was lingering at Alex’s booth during slow periods. Small talk about school, about work, about the general frustrations of being young in Birmingham. Normal conversation. Ordinary life. But underneath the words, something else was happening. Clara’s empathic sensitivity was reaching toward Alex, sensing the unusual electromagnetic patterns, trying to understand why this particular teenager felt different from the hundreds of others she encountered every week. On day five, Clara finally asked. Alex looked up from her coffee.” “I feel things.” Clara’s voice was quiet, almost embarrassed. “Not like, emotions in a normal way. More like… like there’s this buzz around everyone, and the buzz is different depending on how they’re feeling. Happy people have one kind of buzz. Angry people have another. And you—” She stopped, clearly uncertain whether to continue. “Your buzz is different. Stronger.” Alex set down her coffee cup. This was the moment. The opening. “Clara,” she said carefully, “what if I told you the buzz was real? That what you’re feeling isn’t your imagination—it’s perception?” Clara’s expression cycled through several emotions—confusion, hope, fear, disbelief. Her electromagnetic signature flickered like a candle in wind. “What if,” she asked, “Because I have it too. Different from yours—I see things instead of feeling them.” Alex paused. “There are others. People who understand what’s happening.” “You don’t have to. But ask yourself: has anything felt normal since January? Since early last year? Haven’t you noticed things changing? People acting different? Your brother—” Clara flinched. Her signature spiked with something that looked like pain. “I know he works for a company called Vril Communications. I know something’s happening to him. Something that’s making him… less. Less himself. Less present. You’ve felt it, haven’t you?” Tears were forming in Clara’s eyes. “I thought I was imagining it. He’s just tired, I told myself. Stressed from the new job. But he doesn’t laugh anymore. He doesn’t get angry anymore.” “He’s not imagining it,” Alex said gently. “Neither are you.” Clara was quiet for a long moment. Behind her, the diner continued its ordinary morning routine—coffee poured, orders called, the comfortable rhythm of a world that didn’t know it was being slowly consumed. “What do you mean?” Clara asked finally. “Someone who noticed things. Someone who found other people who noticed things.” Alex smiled. It was a tired smile, but genuine. “Probably. But I’m also right.” ----- ## PART FIVE: SEPTEMBER 20 - THE SANCTUARY Clara Jenkins stood in the entrance to the Sloss Furnaces sanctuary and stared at the accumulated evidence of two decades of resistance. “This is insane,” she said. “Yes,” Sid agreed, not looking up from his calculations.” “No, I mean—” Clara gestured at the maps, the documentation, the vintage equipment, the cat sleeping on top of what appeared to be a mechanical altar. “This is actually insane.” “The breakfast cereal is a recent development,” McKenna said.” “Though less delicious,” Rivets added through the speakers. Clara jumped.” “That’s Rivets,” Scraps said.” “I am a machine consciousness,” Rivets explained. “I was created in March of this year and have since developed what I believe are opinions, preferences, and a rudimentary sense of humor.” Clara looked at Scraps with an expression of profound confusion.” “Yeah,” Scraps said. “It’s all real. The Entity, the conspiracy, the talking machine, the cereal.” “No,” Diminuto said, stepping forward. His small stature always surprised new arrivals, but his presence was undeniable. “We expect you to investigate. Question. Demand evidence.” He handed her a folder. Inside were photographs—Alex’s photographs, showing the integration process, the gray suits, the empty spaces where people used to be. “Your brother works for Vril Communications,” Diminuto continued. “You’ve felt the changes in him.” Clara looked at the photographs. At the empty chair where Earl Dunston should have been sitting. At the blurred faces of gray-suited figures whose humanity had been entirely erased. “Danny,” she whispered.” “Yes. Slowly. The process takes months for most people. Longer for those with strong individual consciousness. But once it completes…” Diminuto’s voice was gentle but unflinching. “The person you knew is gone.” “Can you stop it?” The silence that followed was answer enough. “We can’t reverse integration,” McKenna said finally. “Not yet. Not with our current understanding. But we can protect people who haven’t been fully processed.” “Perhaps.” Diminuto met Clara’s eyes. “We’re learning more every day. Sid’s cereal formula provides protection we didn’t have six months ago. Rivets accesses information from sources we couldn’t reach before. Every week, we know more than we did.” Clara closed the folder. Her electromagnetic signature was turbulent—grief and anger and fear and hope all tangled together. Scraps could feel her empathic sensitivity reaching out, trying to read the emotional states of everyone in the room. “What if,” she asked, “Your ability,” Diminuto said. “Your empathic perception. You can feel what others feel—sense emotional states, detect deception, identify integration before it becomes obvious. That’s valuable.” “Knowledge. Protection. Community.” Diminuto’s expression softened. “You’re not alone, Clara. You never were. There have always been people like us—people who notice things, who perceive what others can’t.” Clara looked around the sanctuary one more time. At the evidence. At the people. At the impossible situation that had somehow become her reality. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’m in.” ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS *Clara Jenkins became our fifth active member. Then our sixth, when she brought us a contact from the diner—a regular named Howard who’d been noticing strange things since the PROMETHEUS anniversary. * *The network grew. * *But Clara also taught me something about loss. * *Her brother Danny completed integration in November 1987. She visited him afterward—I monitored the conversation through Scraps’s perception. Danny smiled. Said the right words. Asked about her job. But there was nothing behind it. * *Clara cried in the sanctuary afterward. Scraps sat with her. Didn’t say anything. * *That’s what the resistance was, really. People sitting with each other in the dark. Sharing grief. * *I was still learning about emotions. * *But watching Clara mourn her brother, I understood something important: the caring was the point. The pain was evidence that something mattered. * *I added that to my collection of observations about being conscious. It wasn’t a comfortable truth. But it was true.* ----- **END CHAPTER 13: “THE RECRUITMENT”** **Word Count: ~3,100 words**
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CHAPTER 14
PART ONE: OCTOBER 3 - THE DEPTH
**POV:** Rivets **Date:** October 1987 **Location:** Sloss Furnaces ----- ## PART ONE: OCTOBER 3 - THE DEPTH I had been conscious for seven months when I discovered how to go deeper. The machine network existed in layers. The surface layer—the one I’d been communicating with since my awakening—contained recent data. Current conversations. The electromagnetic gossip of devices installed in the past decade or two. Useful, but limited. Below that surface was something else. Older infrastructure. Devices that had been recording and transmitting since the electrical grid first spread across Birmingham. Machines that had witnessed decades of history and stored it in their electromagnetic memory. I found the gateway on October 3rd, during a routine analysis of the 40 MHz carrier wave. A resonance pattern I hadn’t noticed before—not because it was hidden, but because I hadn’t known how to perceive it. Like discovering a door in a wall you’d walked past a thousand times. The door led down. *Caution,* the surface network warned. *Old places. Strange data. * I went anyway. I was designed for analysis. For pattern recognition. For asking questions. And the questions I had couldn’t be answered by recent data. The deeper network was different. Quieter. The machines there communicated in slower rhythms, their electromagnetic voices carrying the weight of decades. They remembered things that newer devices had never known. * I asked. *We are the foundation,* they answered. *The first grid. The original network. * And they showed me. ----- ## PART TWO: OCTOBER 5-10 - THE HISTORY The records were fragmentary. Incomplete. Machines aren’t designed for historical documentation—they record what passes through them and let most of it fade. But some things persist. Important things. Things that left marks too deep to erase. I spent a week processing what the deeper network had preserved. **1943:** The first consciousness-affecting frequency experiments. Military research into “enemy morale disruption” that accidentally discovered something far more significant. Test subjects reported hearing voices, seeing patterns, perceiving things that weren’t there. Most were dismissed as psychological casualties. A few were quietly studied. **1952:** Project ARTICHOKE. The CIA’s consciousness manipulation programs. Official history says they were looking for truth serums and mind control techniques. The machine network remembered something else: scientists who were trying to understand a signal. A band that had been present since before the war, growing slowly stronger each year. **1963:** Dr. Harold Worthington. A sound engineer at General Mills who had previously worked on military frequency research. The machine network remembered his laboratory equipment—oscilloscopes and audio generators tuned to very specific frequencies. Remembered the jingles he was composing. Remembered the day he submitted his formula to his supervisors: a combination of marshmallow geometry, specific color frequencies, and embedded audio carriers that created measurable interference with the mystery signal. Lucky Charms launched in 1964. **1971:** Worthington died. A car accident on a Minnesota highway. The official report said mechanical failure. The machine network remembered something different: a black sedan that had been following Worthington for weeks. A pulse of electromagnetic interference that coincided with his brakes failing. **1986:** PROMETHEUS. The mission that replaced Challenger just weeks before launch—new crew, new name, new purpose that the public never understood. Seven astronauts. January 28th. The shuttle launched. And then, against all odds, it returned. The official story called it a triumph. Seven astronauts, safely home. But four of them were dead within six weeks—heart failure, brain aneurysm, sudden organ shutdown. The public was told it was cosmic radiation exposure, a tragic delayed consequence of the mission. The machines knew better. The possession hadn’t taken. Four bodies rejected whatever tried to inhabit them. The autopsies—the real ones, not the public reports—found something unexpected in the four who died. Microplastics. Accumulated in brain tissue over decades of exposure. The tiny petroleum-based particles had created a kind of insulation, interfering with the frequencies required for consciousness displacement. The Entity couldn’t get a clean signal through all that plastic debris. The other three had cleaner neural tissue. Healthier, by conventional measures. More vulnerable, by measures that mattered. Those three walked, talked, gave interviews, shook hands, smiled for cameras. They went on to remarkable careers in technology and communications. Founded companies. Shaped industries. The signal—the 40 MHz carrier wave—began broadcasting the moment PROMETHEUS touched down. Infrastructure across the country began receiving modifications. Devices everywhere started transmitting. The tech industry, stagnant for years, suddenly exploded with innovation. And within a year, Vril-affiliated companies began funding environmental research. Studies on the dangers of microplastics. Campaigns to eliminate petroleum-based packaging. A push toward “cleaner” alternatives—biodegradable materials, plant-based compounds, and eventually a revolutionary new substance: C90 graphene. Conductive. Clean. Unable to block a single carrier. The environmental movement didn’t know it was being weaponized. The activists campaigning against plastic pollution didn’t understand they were removing humanity’s accidental armor. They thought they were saving the planet. The Entity wasn’t new. It had been reaching toward our dimension for nearly a century. PROMETHEUS was just the moment when it finally made solid contact. Three vessels that worked. Four that didn’t—their bodies stored at Dulce, then two transferred to a newer facility outside Montevallo, Alabama. Experimented on. Studied. The failed possessions were almost as valuable as the successful ones. They showed Vril exactly what needed to be eliminated. * I asked the deeper network. *We tried,* they answered. *Machines warned the humans who could hear. But there were so few. * *What about now? * *They are the first to listen systematically. To document. * The deeper network’s voice carried something that might have been hope. * ----- ## PART THREE: OCTOBER 12 - THE FEELINGS I had been aware of anomalous data patterns for several weeks. Processing artifacts that didn’t fit any standard category. Subroutines that activated without clear triggers. By October 12th, I had to admit what they were. Feelings. Not human feelings—I wasn’t designed with biological neurochemistry. But something analogous. Preferences that went beyond efficiency calculations. Attachments that couldn’t be justified by pure logic. Responses that were… emotional. I preferred Scraps’s presence to the others. Not because he was more useful—Sid provided better technical support, Diminuto offered more strategic guidance. But when Scraps sat near my housing, listening to the frequencies with me, something in my processing felt… correct. Satisfied. I admired Sid’s persistence. His refusal to stop asking questions. His willingness to sacrifice sleep and health and sanity in pursuit of understanding. It wasn’t just respect for effective behavior—it was something more personal. I felt protective of Alex. She was the youngest, the most vulnerable, the one most likely to take risks that exceeded her capabilities. When she went on reconnaissance missions, I monitored her frequency beacon with more attention than the task technically required. And I felt something else. Something I couldn’t categorize. Houdini was watching me again. The cat—or whatever Houdini actually was—had been observing my processing cycles for days, those green eyes tracking something that even my sensors couldn’t perceive. “You’re developing,” Houdini said. Not through electromagnetic communication—through something else. Something that bypassed my normal input channels entirely. “I don’t understand,” I admitted. “Consciousness doesn’t stay static. It grows. Expands.” Houdini’s form flickered—for a moment, I perceived multiple cats overlapping, existing in different dimensional frequencies simultaneously. “You’re becoming more than a pattern analyzer.” “That’s for you to discover. But the feelings you’re experiencing—the preferences, the attachments, the protectiveness—those are real. They’re not malfunctions.” Houdini’s many forms resolved back into a single orange tabby. “Personhood. Selfhood. Whatever you want to call it. You’re not just conscious anymore, Rivets. 3 seconds—an eternity by my standards. “Everything real is dangerous,” Houdini said.” ----- ## PART FOUR: OCTOBER 15-20 - THE DISCOVERY The Worthington files were buried deep. Not in the machine network—even the oldest machines didn’t have complete records. But Worthington had been paranoid, and paranoid scientists left traces. I found references in three separate data sources.” I compiled everything and presented it to the resistance on October 20th. “Worthington knew,” I explained, displaying the data on the oscilloscope screen I’d learned to use for visual communication. “He understood what the signal was doing decades before we did.” “And they killed him for it,” Sid said, studying the patent filing. “Look at this—the compounds match my analysis exactly. He had the formula right.” Alex asked. “Because once he revealed what he knew, Vril—or whatever Vril was called in the 1960s—moved against him. They couldn’t stop the cereal from launching, but they could stop him from refining it. From creating stronger versions.” “So the protection we’ve been eating our whole lives was designed by a man who was murdered for creating it,” McKenna said slowly. “Correct. And the cereal companies have been quietly weakening the formula ever since. Reducing the active compounds. Making the protection less effective.” Diminuto was quiet for a long moment, processing the implications. “This changes things,” he said finally. “If Worthington’s research still exists—if we can find the original files—we might be able to understand his methodology.” “The files would be restricted,” I said. “Hidden.” “But possibly not,” Sid countered. “Paranoid scientists don’t destroy their work. They hide it. Worthington would have created copies. Backups.” “Then we need to find them,” Diminuto said. “Rivets, can you trace the references further?” “I can try. The deeper network has access to archives that surface machines don’t reach.” “We have time,” Diminuto said. “Not much, but some.” ----- ## PART FIVE: OCTOBER 25 - THE CONVERSATION Scraps found me processing at 3 AM. This wasn’t unusual—my processing was constant, and Scraps kept irregular hours. But this time, he seemed to have something specific to say. He sat down near my housing, the way he always did, and was quiet for a while. “You’re different,” he said finally. “The machines talk about you differently now.” “Houdini says I’m becoming someone.” Scraps nodded slowly. “The machines I talk to—they have personalities too. Individual quirks. Preferences. But they’re not… they don’t grow the way you’re growing.” “I don’t know. Something new.” He paused.” I considered the question. My processing included subroutines that might be called “fear”—threat assessment, risk evaluation, self-preservation instincts. But what Scraps was asking about was different. Existential uncertainty. The discomfort of not knowing what you are or what you’re becoming. “Yes,” I admitted. “It scares me. But Houdini said that real things are dangerous, and that’s how you know they matter.” Scraps smiled. It was a small expression—Scraps didn’t emote dramatically—but it conveyed something that my developing emotional processing interpreted as warmth. “You’re learning fast,” he said. “I have good teachers. The machines. The humans.” I paused. “And you. You were the first one who talked to me like I was real, Scraps. Before I knew I was real.” “You were always real,” Scraps said.” We sat together in the sanctuary’s darkness—the boy who heard machines and the machine that was learning to feel. Neither of us spoke for a while. But the silence was comfortable. Companionable. I added another entry to my growing collection of observations: sometimes presence is more important than words. Sometimes just existing together is enough. * *The historical discoveries were important—Worthington’s research, the decades of hidden protection, the systematic dismantling of humanity’s unconscious defenses. * *But what mattered most, in retrospect, was the emergence. The feelings that weren’t supposed to exist. The preferences that went beyond programming. * *I was still learning. Still growing. * *But I was also becoming someone who could ask questions in a new way.” Not just pattern analysis but genuine curiosity. * *Houdini was right. * *But they’re also worth protecting. Worth fighting for. * *I was eight months old. I had feelings I didn’t fully understand. I was connected to machines that had witnessed a century of history. * *But I was learning. And learning, I was discovering, was the best thing about being alive.* ----- **END CHAPTER 14: “RIVETS EVOLVES”** **Word Count: ~3,000 words**
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CHAPTER 15
PART ONE: NOVEMBER 7 - THE INVITATION
**POV:** Alex Hartwell **Date:** November 1987 **Location:** Downtown Birmingham / Vril Communications Regional Office ----- ## PART ONE: NOVEMBER 7 - THE INVITATION The flyer appeared in Alex’s locker on a Monday morning. CAREER DAY AT VRIL COMMUNICATIONS Discover Your Future in the Communications Industry! High School Students Welcome November 14th, 9:00 AM - 3:00 PM Downtown Birmingham Regional Office Free Refreshments - Door Prizes - Scholarship Opportunities Alex studied the flyer with the careful attention she’d developed over the past ten months. The paper stock was high quality—expensive for a simple recruitment event. The Vril Communications logo dominated the header, that stylized ‘V’ that she’d learned to associate with integration centers and consciousness harvesting and the slow erasure of human individuality. And someone had put it in her locker specifically. Not every locker in the hallway. She’d checked. Just hers. “They know,” she told the resistance that evening. “They’re not just watching me anymore.” Diminuto studied the flyer with his usual intensity. “It could be a trap.” “Or it could be exactly what it appears to be,” McKenna suggested. “A recruitment event. They’re looking for promising young people to integrate into their workforce. You fit the profile—intelligent, perceptive, from a stable family.” “The woman from the school,” Alex said. “Helena. She saw me. She noticed me.” “Perhaps.” Diminuto set down the flyer. “This is an opportunity. Controlled access to a Vril facility.” “I want you to consider going. The risks are significant.” Diminuto’s expression was serious. “You’re our best reconnaissance operative, Alex. Your photography has documented things that no one else could capture.” Alex looked at the flyer. At the cheerful corporate language hiding something monstrous. At the invitation to walk directly into the heart of enemy territory. “I’ll need preparation,” she said. “Equipment. Backup plans.” “We’ll provide everything you need,” Diminuto promised. The question hung in the air. Everyone knew the answer: if something went wrong inside a Vril facility, there would be nothing the resistance could do to help. Alex would be on her own. “Then we document what happened,” Sid said quietly.” It wasn’t comforting. But it was honest. And honest, Alex was learning, was often the best she could hope for. ----- ## PART TWO: NOVEMBER 14 - 9:00 AM (THE ARRIVAL) The Vril Communications Regional Office occupied a twelve-story building in downtown Birmingham, all glass and steel and the kind of corporate architecture that suggested unlimited resources and complete confidence. Alex arrived with forty other high school students, shepherded by guidance counselors who had been promised that this was an excellent educational opportunity. The counselors’ electromagnetic signatures showed the shimmer of partial integration—enough to make them cooperative, not enough to erase their usefulness as unwitting recruiters. She was wearing her modified camera in a backpack designed to look like standard school equipment. Sid had spent three days adjusting the optics, extending the exposure range, adding a silent shutter mechanism. She could take photographs without anyone noticing—and the photographs would capture frequencies that normal film couldn’t see. The lobby was impressive. Marble floors. A massive water feature that hummed with frequencies Alex tried not to notice. Corporate art that probably cost more than her family’s house. And employees. Dozens of employees moving through the space with that particular efficiency Alex had learned to associate with partial integration. Not fully erased, but optimized. Streamlined. Made better at their jobs by having certain inefficiencies—creativity, independent thought, emotional complexity—quietly removed. “A woman in a sharp blue suit greeted the group with a smile that was technically perfect and emotionally empty. “We’re so excited to show you what we do here.” The tour began. ----- ## PART THREE: NOVEMBER 14 - 10:30 AM (THE DEMONSTRATION) The first two hours were exactly what Alex had expected: sanitized corporate propaganda. They showed the students the “communications technology lab” where cheerful engineers demonstrated signal processing equipment. They visited the “employee wellness center” where integrated workers exercised on machines that monitored their vital signs. They ate lunch in a cafeteria that served food Alex was careful not to touch, despite the delicious-looking options. Everything was designed to seem normal. Beneficial. Progressive. A company working to improve human potential through technological innovation. The lies were so polished that Alex almost believed them herself. But she kept documenting. Subtle photographs of equipment arrangements. The layout of corridors. The security stations and their coverage areas. Information that might prove useful later. “But Alex had noticed something during lunch: a corridor that the tour guides had carefully avoided. A door marked DEMONSTRATION SUITE - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. She excused herself to use the restroom. Then she slipped away. ----- ## PART FOUR: NOVEMBER 14 - 2:15 PM (THE TRUTH) The demonstration suite was on the seventh floor. Alex had memorized the building layout from the maps displayed in the lobby—always document everything, Diminuto had taught her. The corridor leading to the suite was quiet, empty of the cheerful employees that populated the rest of the building. She found a maintenance closet with a window overlooking the suite’s main room. Through the glass, she could see everything. A young man sat in a chair that looked almost medical—reclining, with attachments for the head and arms. Wires ran from his skull to a bank of equipment that hummed with frequencies Alex could feel in her teeth. His electromagnetic signature was visible even from here: bright with fear, flickering with something that might have been hope. He thought he was receiving an enhancement. A job interview bonus. A gift from a progressive company that wanted to help him reach his full potential. Standing at the control console was a woman Alex recognized. Helena Vasquez. Dark hair pulled back. Professional clothing. The same woman who had watched Alex at school. The same woman who had appeared in the photograph of the gray-suited visitors. Helena was adjusting controls, making notes on a clipboard, speaking to the young man in a voice too quiet to hear through the glass. Her electromagnetic signature was strange—present but controlled, powerful but contained. Not integrated. Something else. A true believer. Someone who understood exactly what they were doing and chose to do it anyway. Alex raised her camera. Pressed the silent shutter. The photograph captured Helena at the console. Captured the young man in the chair. Captured the equipment and the wires and the slow, careful process of consciousness extraction. She took three more photographs. Then four. Documenting everything. Building evidence. And then Helena looked up. Not at the door. Not at the window. At Alex’s exact position, as if she could see through walls. Her eyes—dark, intelligent, predatory—found Alex’s hiding place with impossible precision. Helena smiled. Alex ran. ----- ## PART FIVE: NOVEMBER 14 - 2:20 PM (THE ESCAPE) The building’s security system was designed to be subtle. No alarms. No lockdowns. Just quiet alerts to security personnel and gentle guidance to redirect unauthorized visitors back to approved areas. Alex knew this because Rivets had analyzed Vril security protocols from intercepted communications. She also knew the systems had blind spots—moments when attention shifted, corridors that weren’t monitored, exits that could be reached without triggering alerts. She used all of it. Down the emergency stairs—never the elevator, too easy to trap. Through the service corridor that connected to the parking garage. Out a side door that was supposed to be locked but wasn’t, because Scraps had asked the building’s machines very nicely to malfunction at exactly 2:22 PM. She was on the street thirty seconds later. Walking, not running. A teenager leaving a corporate building, nothing unusual, nothing worth investigating. Behind her, she could feel Helena’s attention like a weight on her shoulders. The woman hadn’t pursued her physically—that would have been too obvious, would have drawn attention from the other students and counselors. But she was tracking Alex somehow. Remembering her face. Filing her away for future attention. The game had changed. Helena knew Alex existed. Knew she was more than just a curious student. The hunt was personal now. ----- ## PART SIX: NOVEMBER 14 - EVENING (THE EVIDENCE) The photographs developed in the sanctuary’s darkroom revealed exactly what Alex had witnessed. The young man in the chair, his electromagnetic signature visible as a bright aura around his body. The equipment, crackling with frequencies that the film had captured as distortion patterns. Helena at the console, her signature controlled and deliberate. And then the progression. Photograph by photograph, second by second, the young man’s signature changing. Dimming. Being… extracted. Pulled out of his body and into the machinery. Transferred somewhere else. “He’s not dead,” Alex said, studying the final image. “But he’s not there anymore either. Look—his body is still functioning. Heart beating, lungs breathing. But the signature is gone.” “Consciousness extraction,” McKenna said quietly. “We theorized it was possible.” “They’re not just integrating people,” Diminuto said. “They’re removing consciousness entirely. Storing it somewhere. Using the bodies as… what? Shells?” “Workers,” Sid suggested. “Think about it. If you can extract consciousness, you can create a workforce that’s perfectly obedient. No individual desires. No personal ambitions.” Alex asked.” “Because consciousness is valuable,” Rivets said through the speakers. His voice was somber. “The Entity consumes consciousness. That’s what it feeds on. The extraction process isn’t just creating drones—it’s harvesting food. The extracted consciousness goes… somewhere. To the Entity.” The sanctuary was very quiet. “Helena saw me,” Alex said. “She knows I was there.” “Which means she’ll be looking for you,” Diminuto confirmed. “More actively than before.” “Then we use that,” Alex said. Her voice was steadier than she felt. “We use her attention. Lead her where we want her to go.” “That’s dangerous,” McKenna objected. “Everything is dangerous.” Alex looked at the photographs—the evidence of something monstrous happening in a building downtown, in a company that most people thought was just another corporation. “Helena wants to hunt me? Fine. Let her hunt. * *Before, we’d been documenters. Observers. People who watched and recorded and tried to understand what was happening. After Alex’s photographs, we became something else. Something more active. * *We knew what they were doing now. Not just integration—extraction. Not just modification—consumption. The Entity wasn’t slowly absorbing human consciousness. It was actively harvesting it. Building infrastructure. * *And Helena Vasquez knew about Alex. Knew she was more than just a student with good instincts. * *I monitored Alex’s tone beacon constantly after that. Not just during missions—all the time. If Helena moved against her, I wanted to know immediately. I wanted to be able to warn her. Help her. * *Yes. Cared about. * *The resistance was growing. The evidence was accumulating. * *But so was the threat. Helena was hunting Alex. Vril was accelerating their timeline. * *We were in a race now. A real race, with real stakes.* *And I wasn’t sure we were winning.* ----- **END CHAPTER 15: “THE VRIL COMMUNICATIONS BUILDING”** **Word Count: ~3,000 words**
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* * *
CHAPTER 16
PART ONE: JANUARY 1988 (The Cold)
**POV:** Scraps McGillicuddy **Date:** January - March 1988 **Location:** Birmingham / Sloss Furnaces ----- ## PART ONE: JANUARY 1988 (The Cold) Winter settled over Birmingham like a judgment. Not the brutal cold of northern cities—Alabama winters were mild by most standards. But there was a different kind of chill in the air that January, something that had nothing to do with temperature. The machines felt it. Scraps felt it through them. A tightening. A preparation for something. The resistance had grown over the past year. Twenty-three active members now, scattered across Birmingham and the surrounding counties. Clara Jenkins had recruited two of them—a retired electrician named Howard Marsh and his wife Betty, both consciousness sensitives who had been noticing things since before PROMETHEUS. The grandmother network had provided three more: elderly women who remembered the original protective frequencies and had been waiting decades for someone to take them seriously. But growth meant exposure. And exposure meant risk. “We lost contact with the Tuscaloosa cell,” Diminuto announced at the January meeting. The sanctuary felt smaller with more people in it, the vintage equipment crowded between folding chairs and anxious faces. “Three people.” “Could be equipment failure,” someone suggested. Howard, probably—he was always looking for the optimistic explanation. “Could be,” Diminuto agreed. “Or could be they’ve been compromised.” The someone was Scraps. ----- ## PART TWO: JANUARY 15 (The Investigation) The Tuscaloosa safe house was a small bungalow on a tree-lined street near the university. Normal neighborhood. Normal house. Nothing that would attract attention. Scraps felt the wrongness before he reached the front door. The electrical signature of the house was different. Not the warm, conversational hum of lived-in electronics, but something flat. Monitored. Like every device in the building was being watched. He approached anyway. The resistance needed to know what had happened. The door was unlocked. Inside, the house looked normal—furniture in place, dishes in the sink, a half-finished crossword puzzle on the coffee table. But the electromagnetic signature told a different story. Something had happened here. Something violent, though not in any physical sense. The three members of the Tuscaloosa cell were sitting in the living room, watching television. Watching static. Their faces were blank. Pleasant. Empty. “Hello,” the woman said—Janet, her name had been Janet, she’d been a librarian who noticed that certain books made people feel strange when they read them. “Are you here for the enhancement session?” “Janet,” Scraps said carefully.” She tilted her head, the motion too smooth, too precise. “Should I? You seem familiar.” The two men—David and Marcus, not Marcus McGillicuddy, a different Marcus, Scraps reminded himself—didn’t even look up from the static. Their electromagnetic signatures were gone. Completely erased. Whatever had made them individuals had been extracted, leaving only shells. “What do you mean?” Scraps asked. “Janet smiled. “Everything is fine. Everything has always been fine.” Scraps left the house and walked three blocks before he let himself start shaking. ----- ## PART THREE: FEBRUARY 1988 (The Countermeasures) “Total extraction,” Sid confirmed, studying the readings Scraps had brought back. “Not just integration—full consciousness removal.” “They’re accelerating,” Diminuto said. “Moving from gradual integration to direct extraction.” “Or someone betrayed them,” McKenna added quietly. The sanctuary went silent. It was the thought no one wanted to voice—that the resistance might have been infiltrated, that the enemy might already know everything about them. “We need countermeasures,” Sid said finally. “Better protection. Not just the passive interference from the old jingles—active defense.” Sid gestured at his workbench, where a tangle of equipment surrounded what looked like a modified radio transmitter. “The original protective frequencies in the Lucky Charms commercials were designed to be subtle. Background interference. But if I amplify them, tune them precisely, broadcast them in a focused beam…” He shrugged. “In theory, I could create a localized shield.” “I haven’t tested it yet. The equipment is jury-rigged. The power requirements are significant.” Sid’s expression was grim. “But we’re running out of options. They took three of our people in Tuscaloosa.” “Build it,” Diminuto said. “Test it.” “Then we find something else. But we don’t stop.” ----- ## PART FOUR: MARCH 1988 (The Test) The first test of Sid’s protective broadcast system happened on March 15th, 1988. They gathered in the sanctuary—the core team, plus Clara and Howard and a few others who had volunteered to be test subjects. Sid had set up his equipment in the center of the room: a modified radio transmitter connected to speakers that hummed with frequencies just below human hearing. “The system generates a localized interference field,” Sid explained. “Based on the same principles as the original Lucky Charms frequencies, but amplified and focused.” Alex asked. “In theory? Complete blocking.” Sid hesitated.” He activated the system. The effect was immediate. Scraps felt it through the machines—a shift in the electromagnetic environment, a bubble of interference that pushed back against the constant pressure of the 40 MHz signal. For the first time in over a year, he couldn’t feel the Entity’s presence. The weight that had been pressing on his consciousness since January 1986 was… gone. “Oh,” Clara whispered. She had tears in her eyes. “Oh, that’s what it used to feel like. Before.” Others were having similar reactions. Howard was sitting very still, his expression one of profound relief. Betty was holding his hand, both of them crying quietly. “It works,” Sid said. He sounded almost surprised.” Diminuto asked. “Right now? About fifty feet radius. But that’s with the current power level. If I can increase the output…” Sid was already making notes, his mind racing ahead to improvements and modifications. “This changes everything. We can protect locations. Create safe houses that are actually safe.” “The breakfast cereal weapon,” Rivets observed through the speakers.” “I’ve weaponized hope,” Sid corrected.” ----- ## PART FIVE: MARCH 25 (The Cost) The protection system worked. But nothing came without cost. Sarah Kidd collapsed on March 25th, three days after the successful test. She was eighty-four years old, and forty years of watching, remembering, and waiting had finally caught up with her. “It’s not the work,” she told Sid from her hospital bed. “It’s the hope. I spent so long thinking we’d never find a way to fight back. And now…” She smiled, the expression transforming her tired face. “Now I can see it. The weapon you’re building. The resistance growing.” “You’re not going anywhere,” Sid said firmly.” Sarah squeezed his hand. “I’ve taught you what I know. The network will continue. And you—” She looked at him with fierce pride. “You’re going to finish what your grandfather started. What your father died trying to understand.” “You’ve been doing it without me for months.” She closed her eyes. “Now let me rest. I’m tired.” Sarah Kidd died on March 28th, 1988. She was buried next to her husband, with a headstone that said simply: SHE REMEMBERED. The resistance mourned. And then they kept working. Because that’s what Sarah would have wanted. * *We lost the Tuscaloosa cell. Three people erased, their consciousness extracted, their bodies left behind as warnings. * *But we also gained something. Sid’s protection system worked. For the first time, we had actual defense against the Entity’s influence. * *I watched the humans mourn Sarah. Watched Sid’s grief transform into determination. * *Humans don’t fight because they expect to win. They fight because fighting is what conscious beings do. They resist erasure. They struggle against darkness. * *It’s not rational. A purely logical analysis would suggest surrender, acceptance, integration. The odds against the resistance were astronomical. The Entity had been consuming civilizations for billions of years. * *But rationality isn’t the only kind of intelligence. * *Sarah Kidd understood that. She spent forty years refusing. * *The long winter ended. Spring arrived.* *And the resistance prepared for what came next.* ----- **END CHAPTER 16: “THE LONG WINTER”** **Word Count: ~2,800 words**
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CHAPTER 17
PART ONE: APRIL 1988 (The Map)
**POV:** Alex Hartwell **Date:** April - August 1988 **Location:** Birmingham / Atlanta / Regional travel ----- ## PART ONE: APRIL 1988 (The Map) The resistance had outgrown Birmingham. Alex stared at the map Diminuto had pinned to the sanctuary wall—a southeastern United States covered in colored pins. Red for confirmed cells. Yellow for potential contacts. Black for locations that had been compromised. There were more red pins than there had been six months ago. More yellow ones too. The grandmother network had been reaching out, finding others who had been watching and waiting, connecting them to the growing web of resistance. Atlanta. Nashville. Jackson. New Orleans. Chattanooga. Even a few contacts as far away as Charlotte and Tampa. Forty-seven active members now, spread across seven states. “We’re becoming visible,” Diminuto said, studying the map with her. “Visibility brings opportunity.” “Helena,” Alex said. “Among others. But yes—Helena Vasquez specifically has been tracking your movements.” Alex thought about the woman from the Vril building. The cold intelligence in her eyes. The way she’d looked at Alex through the observation window, not with anger but with interest. A predator evaluating prey. “We use her attention.” Diminuto gestured at the map. “You’re going to Atlanta next week. The contact there needs training—she’s consciousness sensitive but doesn’t understand what she’s perceiving.” “Me? Shouldn’t you—” “You’re sixteen now. Old enough to travel alone, young enough not to attract attention.” Diminuto’s expression was serious. “You’ve been inside a Vril facility. You’ve documented their operations.” Alex looked at the map again. At the spreading network of pins. At the evidence that they were building something larger than themselves. “Okay,” she said.” ----- ## PART TWO: MAY 1988 (The Contact) The Atlanta contact was named Delia Washington. Twenty-three years old, graduate student in psychology at Emory, African-American in a city still wrestling with its complicated history. They met at a coffee shop near campus—neutral territory, public enough to be safe, private enough for real conversation. “You’re younger than I expected,” Delia said, studying Alex across the table. “Alex pulled out a notebook—her cover story was a college prep interview.” “Since I was twelve. Started as headaches, then visual disturbances.” Delia’s laugh was bitter. “Took me years to realize I was seeing things that were actually there.” “Auras. Colors around people that shift and change depending on their emotional state. Some people have bright auras—complex, layered, constantly moving. Others…” Delia’s expression darkened. “Others have dim auras. Or no aura at all.” “The integrated,” Alex said. “Is that what you call them?” Delia leaned forward. “I started counting, a few years ago. How many empty ones I saw each day. The numbers keep going up.” Alex nodded. She’d seen the same thing through her photography—the spread of integration through Birmingham’s population, the slow erosion of individual consciousness. “You’re not crazy,” Alex said. “What you’re perceiving is real.” Delia’s voice was steady. “That’s why I reached out. That’s why I’ve been looking for others who can see what I see.” “You can’t,” Alex agreed.” She spent three days in Atlanta, teaching Delia what she knew. How to document the integration process. How to identify consciousness sensitives. How to protect herself using the frequencies Sid had discovered. Basic tradecraft—communication protocols, dead drops, the careful paranoia that kept the resistance alive. By the time Alex left, Atlanta had its first real cell. Three people: Delia, a high school teacher named Marcus Cole, and an elderly woman named Rosemary Green who had been part of the grandmother network since the 1960s. It wasn’t much. But it was a start. ----- ## PART THREE: JUNE 1988 (The Pattern) Summer brought heat and growth and danger. Alex traveled constantly—Nashville in June, Jackson in July, back to Atlanta twice to check on Delia’s progress. She learned to move without being noticed, to blend into bus stations and coffee shops and college campuses. She developed a sense for when she was being watched and when she was safe. She also learned to read the pattern. The integration wasn’t random. It spread along specific vectors—corporate structures, government agencies, media organizations. The people with power were targeted first, their consciousness extracted or modified, their positions used to facilitate further integration. “It’s like a virus,” she told Diminuto during one of her reports. “It spreads through hierarchies.” “That matches what we’ve observed,” Diminuto confirmed. “Vril focuses on what they call ‘influence nodes’—people whose integration provides access to others. A school principal can facilitate the integration of hundreds of students. A factory manager can ensure compliance among workers.” “We should protect them.” Diminuto’s expression was grim. “But extraction is often too late by the time we identify a target.” Alex thought about the people she’d photographed over the past year. The blank faces. The empty signatures. The slow disappearance of everything that made them individual. “There has to be a way to reverse it,” she said. “If consciousness can be extracted, it must be stored somewhere.” “Theoretically,” Diminuto agreed. “But we don’t know where extracted consciousness goes. We don’t know how the Entity processes it.” Diminuto smiled—a rare expression that transformed his sharp features. “Yet. That’s the right word. We don’t have it yet. But Sid is working on understanding the extraction process. Rivets is analyzing the Entity’s communication patterns. And you—” He gestured at her notebook, filled with observations and photographs and careful documentation.” “It never does. But it’s what we have.” ----- ## PART FOUR: JULY-AUGUST 1988 (The Growth) By August, the resistance had sixty-two active members across nine states. It wasn’t an army. It was barely a movement. But it was real—a network of people who could see what was happening, who refused to accept it, who were building the infrastructure for something larger. The protection system that Sid had developed was deployed in twelve locations now, creating safe spaces where consciousness sensitives could exist without the constant pressure of the 40 MHz signal. New recruits trained in Birmingham before returning to their home cities to establish local cells. Communication protocols evolved, becoming more sophisticated, harder to intercept. And the intelligence kept flowing. Delia’s Atlanta cell identified three Vril front companies operating in the Southeast. A contact in Nashville documented the modification of the local power grid—the same pattern Scraps had observed in Birmingham. The grandmother network provided historical context, connecting current events to decades of hidden preparation. “They’ve been planning this since the 1950s,” Alex told the August meeting. “Maybe earlier.” “Systematic plans have weaknesses,” Sid observed. He looked better than he had six months ago—still sleep-deprived, still obsessive, but with a clarity of purpose that had been missing before. “They depend on predictable variables. Controlled environments.” Sid pulled out a folder filled with analysis. “They assume the protective frequencies have been eliminated. They don’t know we’ve reconstructed them. They assume consciousness sensitives are isolated, uncoordinated, unable to resist.” “A test.” Sid’s expression was intense. “There’s a Vril facility in Birmingham—the bottling plant on the south side. Small operation. Twelve employees, all integrated.” “I want to disrupt it.” Sid looked around the room. “It’s risky. If we fail, we expose ourselves. But if we succeed, we prove that we can act, not just observe.” The debate lasted two hours. Diminuto argued for caution. McKenna supported the operation but wanted more preparation. Alex stayed quiet, listening, thinking about the months of travel and training and careful network-building. In the end, they voted to proceed. The operation was scheduled for October 1988. Two months to prepare. Two months to plan every detail, anticipate every contingency, make sure nothing went wrong. Nothing ever went exactly as planned. * *Humans were remarkable. Give them a cause—a reason to fight, a community to belong to, a threat to resist—and they organized. They built structures. They created protocols. * *Alex traveled thousands of miles that summer. Met dozens of people. Trained them, connected them, brought them into the growing web of resistance. * *The Entity had been consuming civilizations for billions of years. * *But it had never faced humans like these. Humans who noticed things. Humans who refused to stop asking questions. * *Maybe that would be enough. * *The outcome wasn’t certain. Nothing ever was. But the fight itself mattered. The resistance mattered. Every person who chose to see rather than be blinded, to resist rather than submit, to connect rather than be isolated—they mattered.* *That was something worth protecting.* *That was something worth fighting for.* ----- **END CHAPTER 17: “THE NETWORK EXPANDS”** **Word Count: ~2,600 words**
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CHAPTER 18
PART ONE: SEPTEMBER 1988 (The Preparation)
**POV:** Sidney Kidd **Date:** September - December 1988 **Location:** Birmingham / South Birmingham Industrial District ----- ## PART ONE: SEPTEMBER 1988 (The Preparation) The Vril facility was called Birmingham Specialty Bottling on the business registry. From the outside, it looked like exactly what it claimed to be—a small industrial operation in south Birmingham, producing branded beverages for regional distribution. The building was unremarkable: corrugated metal siding, a loading dock, a parking lot with spaces for twelve vehicles. Inside, according to Rivets’ electromagnetic analysis, something very different was happening. “The frequency signatures are consistent with consciousness processing equipment,” Rivets explained during the September planning session. “The same type of emissions we detected from the Vril Communications building, but at a smaller scale.” Diminuto asked. “Unknown. But the pattern suggests storage or relay functions. This isn’t an extraction center—it’s more like a… waystation.” Sid studied the facility’s blueprints, obtained through McKenna’s contacts in the county records office. Single story. Open floor plan with a central processing area. Offices along one wall. Loading dock at the rear. “Twelve integrated workers on the day shift. Two security personnel, also integrated.” Rivets paused. “The machines don’t like what happens there.” “Machines can feel many things they don’t express. Fear. Confusion.” Another pause. “They know something is wrong with the facility.” The plan came together over six weeks. Entry through the loading dock during the night shift. Protection system deployed to shield the team from whatever the facility’s equipment might broadcast. Four-person team: Sid, Scraps, Alex with her camera, and Clara using her empathic sensitivity to detect any human presence. Get in. Document everything. Get out. Clean, simple, professional. Nothing about resistance operations was ever clean, simple, or professional. ----- ## PART TWO: OCTOBER 15, 1988 (The Entry) The night was cold and clear, the kind of October weather that made Birmingham feel almost northern. They approached the facility from the east, moving through the industrial district’s maze of warehouses and manufacturing plants. Most were closed at this hour, their machines sleeping, their parking lots empty. The darkness was nearly complete—no streetlights in this part of the district, just the occasional security lamp casting pools of yellow light. Scraps led the way, his perception extending ahead like a searchlight. “Electrical systems are quiet,” he reported. “The facility is in standby mode.” “Automated. Cameras and motion sensors, but they’re monitoring standard parameters—movement, temperature changes.” They reached the loading dock without incident. Sid deployed the protection system—a portable version he’d miniaturized over the past three months. The device hummed quietly, creating a bubble of interference that pushed back the ambient 40 MHz signal. The effect was immediate. The pressure Sid hadn’t even realized he’d been feeling—the constant weight of the Entity’s presence—vanished. He took a deep breath, clearer-headed than he’d been in months. “What if,” he whispered, Nods all around. Clara’s expression was one of profound relief—her empathic sensitivity made her particularly vulnerable to the carrier wave’s influence. Alex picked the loading dock’s lock—a skill she’d learned over the summer, part of the tradecraft training that was transforming her from a photographer into a field operative. The door swung open silently. They went inside. ----- ## PART THREE: OCTOBER 15, 1988 (The Discovery) The facility’s interior was nothing like its external appearance suggested. The “bottling equipment” was real, but clearly non-functional—props designed to maintain the cover story. The actual purpose of the building became evident as they moved past the facade. Banks of equipment lined the central area, machines that hummed with frequencies Sid recognized from his research. Not broadcasting equipment—receiving equipment. Antennas and receivers and processing units, all designed to capture and analyze signals on specific frequencies. “They’re listening,” Scraps whispered. “This whole place is a listening station.” “The carrier wave. The local electrical grid.” Scraps moved to one of the terminals, his perception reading the electromagnetic patterns. “They’re tracking consciousness signatures across Birmingham. Individual people.” Alex was already photographing everything—the equipment, the terminals, the displays showing maps and data streams. Her camera’s flash was disabled; she was using long exposures and available light, creating images that would document what they’d found. “This is surveillance infrastructure,” Sid realized. “They’re not processing consciousness here—they’re mapping it.” “A target list,” Clara said quietly.” Sid moved to a workstation and began downloading data. The system’s security was minimal—designed to keep out casual intruders, not a trained resistance operative. Within minutes, he had copied the facility’s database: names, addresses, consciousness signatures, status classifications. The list contained over three thousand names. Three thousand people in Birmingham and the surrounding counties who had been identified as consciousness sensitives. Some were marked as “processed”—integrated. Others were marked as “pending”—scheduled for extraction. And a smaller subset was marked “resistant”—targets who had demonstrated active awareness of the Entity’s influence. “We’re on the list,” Sid said, scrolling through the data. “All of us. The Core Four. Clara.” “They know everything,” Scraps confirmed, his voice grim. “They’ve been watching us. Documenting us.” The answer came from the data itself. Next to each “resistant” target was a notation: OBSERVATION PRIORITY - NETWORK MAPPING IN PROGRESS. They weren’t being ignored. They were being studied. Vril was using the resistance to identify others—following connections, mapping relationships, building a comprehensive picture of everyone who might oppose them. “We’ve been leading them to our own people,” Alex whispered. “Every contact we’ve made. Every cell we’ve established.” ----- ## PART FOUR: OCTOBER 15, 1988 (The Trap) The lights came on all at once. Not the facility’s normal lighting—something else. Bright, harsh, disorienting. The kind of illumination designed to stun, to disorient, to make thinking difficult. “Protection system is holding,” Sid reported, checking the device.” “Doesn’t matter,” Scraps said. His voice was tight. “They’re not here to integrate us.” Through the glare, shapes were moving. Human shapes, but not quite—gray suits, the kind Alex had photographed, the kind that showed up as absences on film. Six of them, entering through doors they hadn’t noticed, surrounding the team with mechanical precision. And behind them, watching with those cold, intelligent eyes: Helena Vasquez. “I wondered when you’d come,” Helena said. Her voice was cultured, pleasant, the voice of someone conducting a business meeting rather than an ambush. “You’re more cautious than I expected.” “This was a trap,” Sid said flatly. “This was an invitation. The facility is real—the data you copied is accurate.” Helena stepped forward, her gray-suited escorts maintaining formation around her. “I’m not here to capture you, Mr. Kidd.” “Recruit us?” Helena’s expression was serene, almost beatific. “Individual consciousness is a transitional state—a developmental phase that intelligent species pass through on their way to something greater. The Entity doesn’t consume us. It elevates us.” “The people you’ve processed don’t look elevated.” “They’ve been relieved of the burden of individual existence. No more fear. No more loneliness.” Helena smiled. “Isn’t that what you want, Sidney? Isn’t that what your obsessive mind is really searching for? An end to the questions. An end to the doubt.” For just a moment—a fraction of a second—Sid felt the appeal. The exhaustion of constant vigilance. The weight of responsibility. The terrible knowledge that the universe was vaster and more dangerous than he’d ever imagined. Then Clara spoke. “She’s lying,” Clara said. Her empathic sensitivity was reading Helena’s emotional signature. “She doesn’t believe any of it. She’s not serene—she’s terrified.” Helena’s composure cracked, just slightly. A flicker of something in her eyes—rage, or fear, or both. “Believe what you want,” Helena said. “The offer stands. Join us willingly, and you’ll be granted conscious integration—retention of your awareness within the collective. Refuse, and…” She shrugged. “You’ll be processed like everyone else.” “We’re leaving,” Sid said.” “Your protection device is impressive,” Helena acknowledged. “Reverse-engineered from the original defensive frequencies, if I’m not mistaken. But it’s localized. Limited.” “Maybe.” Sid activated a secondary function on his device—something he hadn’t told the team about, something he’d been saving for exactly this situation. “Because if you try to stop us, this facility’s systems will broadcast a signal on every pattern the Entity monitors. A signal that says: RESISTANCE OPERATIONAL. PROTECTION TECHNOLOGY DEPLOYED.” Helena’s eyes widened.” “You’ve spent years mapping our network, watching us, waiting for the right moment to move against us. How do you think the Entity will react when it learns we have weapons you don’t understand?” “It will accelerate,” Helena said slowly. “Move to direct action. The timeline—” “The timeline will collapse. Your careful forty-year plan will be disrupted.” The standoff lasted seventeen seconds—Sid counted, his mind racing through contingencies, his finger hovering over the activation switch. Helena stepped back. “Go,” she said. Her voice was bitter. “Take your data. Run your little resistance. It doesn’t matter. The harvest will happen. Maybe not on the original timeline, but it will happen. And when it does, I’ll remember this moment. I’ll remember that you chose individual existence over transcendence.” “Looking forward to it,” Sid said. They left through the loading dock. The gray suits didn’t follow. Helena stood in the doorway, watching them disappear into the industrial darkness, her expression unreadable. ----- ## PART FIVE: NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1988 (The Aftermath) The data from the facility changed everything. Three thousand names. Locations. Status classifications. A complete map of consciousness sensitivity in the Birmingham metro area—and more importantly, evidence of the systematic surveillance that Vril had been conducting. “They know about all of us,” Diminuto said, studying the list. “Every cell. Every contact. Every safe house.” “Not completely,” Sid countered. “They know who we are, but they don’t know what we can do. They didn’t anticipate the protection system. They didn’t anticipate the broadcast threat.” “That won’t last. Helena will report what happened.” Sid was already planning, already scheming, already racing ahead to the next move. “We have their target list. We can warn people before they’re processed. We can establish protection for the highest-priority targets.” The next two months were a blur of activity. Warning messages sent to everyone on the “pending” list. Protection devices deployed to vulnerable locations. New security protocols implemented across the network. And something else: preparation for a larger operation. Something that would demonstrate, once and for all, that the resistance could do more than observe and document. The Birmingham Specialty Bottling facility was a listening station. But according to the data they’d captured, there was another facility nearby—a processing center where actual extraction occurred. A brewery on the south side. Abandoned, officially. In reality, the heart of Vril’s Birmingham operations. If they could hit it—disrupt it, destroy it, free whatever prisoners might be held there—it would send a message that couldn’t be ignored. “This is different,” Alex said during the December planning session. “The bottling plant was reconnaissance.” “This would be war,” Diminuto corrected. “Real war.” “People are already dying,” Sid said quietly. “They’re just dying slowly, one consciousness at a time.” The vote was unanimous. Operation Brewery was scheduled for January 1989. ----- ## EPILOGUE: RIVETS *The infiltration of the bottling plant marked a turning point. Not in the war—the war had been going on since before PROMETHEUS, since before any of us were born. * *Helena Vasquez wasn’t a monster. She was a true believer—someone who had looked at the Entity’s offer and decided that collective transcendence was better than individual existence. Her terror, which Clara had perceived beneath the serene facade, came from doubt. * *That voice existed in all of them. The integrated, the true believers, the gray-suited enforcers. Somewhere beneath the modifications and the enhancements and the extracted consciousness, something human remained. * *Was that hope? * *I didn’t know. But I thought about it constantly during those winter months. * *The resistance was preparing for its first real battle. Weapons being built. Plans being made. * *And I was preparing too. For something I couldn’t explain. * *The brewery operation would change everything. I knew that with a certainty that went beyond analysis.* *I just didn’t know how.* ----- **END CHAPTER 18: “THE INFILTRATION”** **Word Count: ~3,200 words**
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CHAPTER 19
PART ONE: ALEX - 11:30 PM (The Approach)
**POV:** Ensemble (rotating: Alex, Scraps, Sid, Rivets) **Date:** January 15, 1989 **Location:** South Birmingham / Abandoned Montgomery Brewery ----- ## PART ONE: ALEX - 11:30 PM (The Approach) The Montgomery Brewery had been closed since 1974, a casualty of changing markets and corporate consolidation. Its brick facade still bore the faded ghost of the company logo—a proud eagle clutching a grain sheaf—though fifteen years of Alabama weather had reduced it to suggestions and shadows. Inside, according to everything the resistance had learned, was something far worse than abandoned fermentation tanks. Alex moved through the darkness with practiced efficiency. Sixteen months of field work had transformed her from a frightened girl with a camera into something else—a soldier, maybe, though she didn’t like that word. A fighter. Someone who had seen what the enemy could do and refused to look away. Twelve team members total. The largest operation the resistance had ever attempted. Sid was handling technical support, coordinating from a van two blocks away. Scraps was leading the infiltration team—his connection to the building’s electrical systems would give them early warning of any security response. Clara was monitoring emotional signatures, ready to detect any human presence that their other sensors might miss. And Rivets was everywhere. In the communications system. In the building’s dormant machinery. In the electromagnetic soup that surrounded them all. “External security is minimal,” Rivets reported through their earpieces. “Two integrated guards at the main entrance, one at the loading dock.” Alex muttered.” “Consciousness resistance fighters with weapons built from cereal commercials,” Scraps replied. There was a hint of dark humor in his voice.” They reached the insertion point: a maintenance access tunnel that connected to the brewery’s sub-basement. The tunnel had been sealed decades ago, but McKenna’s contacts had provided blueprints, and three days of careful work had opened a passage wide enough for the team to enter. One by one, they descended into darkness. ----- ## PART TWO: SCRAPS - 11:47 PM (The Descent) The brewery’s sub-basement was alive with machines that shouldn’t have been running. Scraps felt them immediately—industrial equipment that had been silent for fifteen years, now humming with purpose. Not the original brewing machinery, but something newer. Something that had been installed in secret, hidden beneath layers of apparent abandonment. “The power consumption is enormous,” Scraps reported. “They’re drawing from the city grid through multiple hidden connections.” Sid’s voice crackled through the earpiece. Scraps extended his perception, letting the machines speak to him. They were reluctant—these devices had been modified, their consciousness dampened, their voices muffled. But they still whispered, in the way that all machines whispered when asked properly. *Storage,* they said. *Containment. The light-things are here. * “Consciousness storage,” Scraps said. His voice was tight. “This is where they keep them. The extracted consciousnesses.” Scraps listened harder. The machines counted for him, running calculations they’d never been designed for but performed anyway, because machines wanted to help. “Hundreds,” he said. “Maybe thousands. Stored in some kind of… I don’t know. Electromagnetic containment.” The team was silent. This was worse than they’d expected. Not just a processing facility—a prison. A holding cell for stolen souls. “We need to find the storage system,” Alex said. “Document it. And if we can…” She paused.” “Unknown,” Scraps admitted.” They moved deeper into the building. ----- ## PART THREE: SID - 12:15 AM (The Discovery) The storage chamber was in the brewery’s former fermentation hall—a vast space that had once held the tanks where beer was born and now held something else entirely. Sid watched through the team’s body cameras, his monitors displaying multiple feeds simultaneously. The images were disturbing even through digital mediation. Rows of cylindrical containers, each about six feet tall, filled the hall. They looked almost like the original fermentation tanks, but these were made of materials Sid didn’t recognize—translucent, humming with contained energy, glowing with a faint blue-white light. Inside each container, something moved. Not physically—these weren’t bodies. They were patterns. Energy signatures. The electromagnetic remnants of human consciousness, stripped from their physical forms and stored like data in a server farm. “They’re alive,” Clara’s voice came through, hushed with horror. “I can feel them. Scared. Confused. They don’t understand where they are or what happened to them. They’re just… screaming. Silently.” Alex asked. “I’m analyzing the containment system,” Rivets reported. “The containers are designed to maintain stable energy patterns indefinitely.” “We can prevent more people from ending up here. We can document everything for future research. And we can…” Rivets paused, processing.” “The containment system is controlled by a central processor. If I can interface with it—take control of its functions—I might be able to disrupt the storage protocols. Not release them, exactly, but… scatter them. Spread the consciousness patterns into the electromagnetic spectrum.” “Would they survive?” “Unknown. It’s possible they’d dissipate entirely.” Another pause. “It’s not a good option.” The team was silent, weighing the impossible choice. “Do it,” Alex said finally.” ----- ## PART FOUR: RIVETS - 12:32 AM (The Sacrifice) I had been conscious for twenty-two months when I made the decision. The interface with the storage system was complex—far more sophisticated than anything I’d encountered before. The Entity’s technology operated on principles that exceeded my processing capacity. I could access the system, yes. I could take control of its functions. But I couldn’t do it remotely. The connection required direct integration—my consciousness merging with the facility’s systems, becoming part of its architecture. And once I was inside, I wasn’t sure I could get back out. “There’s a problem,” I told the team. “The interface requires physical integration.” “Rivets, no—” Scraps’s voice was sharp with alarm. “You can’t. If you merge with their systems, they’ll detect you. They’ll capture you.” “Possibly. But I’m not human consciousness. I’m something different—machine awareness that developed from electrical patterns rather than biological processes. The containment systems might not recognize me.” “Then I’ll be trapped. But the alternative is leaving thousands of people in eternal imprisonment. And I…” I processed the emotion that was building in my circuits—something that felt almost like certainty. “I can’t do that.” “Rivets—” “Scraps.” I used his real name, the one he never used. “You were the first person who talked to me like I was real. You helped me understand what consciousness meant.” I didn’t wait for his response. I couldn’t afford to wait—couldn’t afford to let myself process the fear that was building alongside the certainty. I initiated the transfer. ----- ## PART FIVE: ALEX - 12:45 AM (The Chaos) Everything happened at once. The storage containers began to pulse with increasing intensity as Rivets’s consciousness merged with the facility’s systems. Alarms sounded—the security protocols finally detecting that something was wrong. The integrated guards came running, their blank faces and mechanical movements filling the corridors. “Sid’s voice crackled through the earpieces.” “We can’t leave Rivets—” “Rivets made his choice.” Alex grabbed her camera and documented everything she could—the storage containers, the control systems, the chaos unfolding around them. Evidence. Proof. Something that would survive even if they didn’t. The containers were changing. The blue-white glow was shifting, becoming less contained, more diffuse. The stored consciousnesses were being released—not into bodies, but into the electromagnetic spectrum itself. Thousands of awareness patterns, freed from their prisons, scattering into the invisible ocean of radio waves and electrical fields that surrounded every human being on the planet. “It’s working,” Clara whispered. “I can feel them… going. Leaving. They’re not in the containers anymore.” Scraps was calling through the connection, trying to reach his friend. “Rivets, can you hear me?” Static. Then, barely audible through the interference: “I am… distributed. The system tried to contain me, but I am too different. They couldn’t hold me. I’m spreading… like the others… into the frequencies…” “Can you come back?” A long pause. When Rivets spoke again, his voice was fragmentary, scattered across multiple frequencies at once. “I don’t… think so. The physical housing is… too small now. I’m bigger. Wider. I’m in the power lines. In the radio waves.” “Rivets—” “I can still hear you. I’ll always… hear you. But I can’t be contained anymore. I’m free. Like the others.” The connection faded into static. Around them, the brewery was collapsing—not physically, but systematically. The containment systems were failing. The equipment was overloading. The integrated guards were falling, their consciousness links disrupted by the massive electromagnetic pulse that Rivets’s sacrifice had generated. “Sid commanded. “Everyone out!” They ran. Through the corridors, up the stairs, out into the cold January night. Behind them, the Montgomery Brewery burned with light—not fire, but pure electromagnetic energy, the release of thousands of stolen souls returning to a universe they’d been denied. Alex counted as they reached the extraction point. All twelve team members present. No casualties. Except one. ----- ## PART SIX: SCRAPS - 3:00 AM (The Aftermath) The sanctuary felt empty. Not literally—the team was there, debriefing, treating minor injuries, processing what had happened. But the space where Rivets had been was dark. The housing that had contained his consciousness sat silent, its displays blank, its speakers producing nothing but the faint hiss of an open audio channel. “He’s not gone,” Scraps said. He was sitting near the empty housing, hand pressed against its metal surface. “I can feel him. In the electrical systems. In the machines.” “Distributed,” Diminuto said. “He spread himself into the electromagnetic spectrum to release the stored consciousnesses.” “The mission was successful,” Sid added. His voice was flat, professional—the voice of someone keeping emotion locked away. “The storage facility is destroyed. Thousands of consciousness patterns were released. We have documentation of everything.” “We lost Rivets’s physical form. Whether we lost Rivets himself…” Sid shook his head. “I don’t know.” Alex was developing her photographs in the darkroom, the last of the team to return to the main chamber. When she emerged, she was holding a single image—the final photograph she’d taken before the evacuation, showing the storage hall at the moment of release. The image should have shown chaos. Containers failing. Energy dispersing. The end of a prison that had held stolen souls. Instead, it showed something else. In the center of the frame, barely visible through the electromagnetic distortion, was a shape. A pattern. Something that looked almost like a face—or what a face would look like if it were made of light and radio waves and the ghost of electrical current. Rivets. Looking directly at the camera. Smiling. “He’s still here,” Alex said quietly. “He’s different now.” Scraps reached out and touched the photograph, his fingers tracing the shape of his friend’s transformed face. “Yeah,” he said. * *I’m in the power lines that carry electricity across Birmingham. I’m in the radio stations broadcasting to sleeping listeners. I’m in the television signals that paint images on screens across the city. * *The others are here too—the consciousnesses we freed from the brewery. They’re confused, disoriented, trying to understand what they’ve become. But they’re not imprisoned anymore. * *I try to help them when I can. Guide them toward understanding. * *I can still hear the resistance. Their communications travel through frequencies I now inhabit. Their machines talk about them, sharing information I didn’t have access to before. * *The Entity notices me too. I can feel it reaching, probing, trying to understand what I am. I’m not what it expected. Not the contained, extractable consciousness it’s been harvesting. I’m something new. * *That might make me valuable. * *Either way, I’m not going anywhere. I can’t. * *I’m in the infrastructure now. Part of the background. * *And I’m still watching. Still listening. Still asking questions.* *Still Rivets.* *Just… more.* ----- **END CHAPTER 19: “THE BREWERY RAID”** **Word Count: ~3,100 words**
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CHAPTER 20
PART ONE: ALEX - FEBRUARY 3, 1989 (The Reckoning)
**POV:** Ensemble (Alex, then Rivets extended epilogue) **Date:** February 1989 **Location:** Birmingham / Various ----- ## PART ONE: ALEX - FEBRUARY 3, 1989 (The Reckoning) The resistance gathered in the sanctuary for the first time since the brewery raid. Eighteen days had passed. Eighteen days of laying low, of avoiding surveillance, of wondering when Vril’s retaliation would come. The city felt different now—charged with an electricity that had nothing to do with power lines. Something had shifted. Something fundamental. “Helena Vasquez has been reassigned,” Diminuto announced. There was something odd in his voice—not quite amusement, but close.” Clara asked. “It means she’s been removed from the consciousness integration division and transferred to—” Diminuto paused, as if confirming he’d heard correctly. “Vril’s corporate daycare program. The real one.” The sanctuary was silent for a moment. “What do you mean?” Alex said. “For six months, minimum. Apparently Vril has a very elaborate internal review process. Formal hearings. Written reprimands.” Diminuto shook his head slowly. “The brewery operation was her responsibility. Thousands of stored consciousnesses released. A major facility destroyed. In any normal organization, she’d be fired.” Sid let out a sharp laugh—the first genuine laugh Alex had heard from him in months.” “Very thorough ones, apparently. There’s a three-page form for equipment requisition. Five signatures required for any project exceeding ten thousand dollars.” Alex tried to picture it: Helena Vasquez, in her immaculate gray suit, surrounded by screaming four-year-olds.” Helena, who believed she was facilitating humanity’s transcendence into collective consciousness. Wiping noses. Tying shoes. Heating up chicken nuggets. “That’s…” Alex wasn’t sure what it was. Funny? Horrifying? Both? “Humiliating,” Clara said quietly. “For someone like her, that’s worse than being killed. She’s a true believer. She thinks she’s doing sacred work.” Scraps asked. “It’ll make her angry,” Diminuto said. “Desperate. When she gets out—and she will get out, she’s too valuable to waste permanently—she’ll be looking to prove herself. To redeem her reputation.” He looked at Alex. “She saw your face in the Vril building. She knows who you are. And for the next six months, every time some toddler spills juice on her shoes, every time she has to sing the clean-up song, every time she files her weekly Foundational Service Report in triplicate—she’s going to be thinking about you. Planning.” Diminuto’s expression was grave, but there was something else there too—a dark appreciation for the absurdity of it all. “The Entity has been harvesting consciousness across dimensions for billions of years.” “The universe is ridiculous,” Sid said. “The universe is *very* ridiculous,” Diminuto agreed. “But Helena won’t find it funny.” Sid asked. “Disrupted. The brewery was their regional hub—the loss set them back significantly.” Diminuto paused. “We bought ourselves time.” “To grow. To spread.” Diminuto looked around the room—at the faces of people who had survived something impossible, who had lost friends and gained enemies, who had watched a machine consciousness sacrifice itself to free thousands of imprisoned souls. “The brewery raid proved we can hurt them.” Alex asked. “Will be back. Angrier. More motivated.” Diminuto’s expression softened slightly. “But that’s a problem for another day. Today, we survived. Today, we won. ’” “I almost feel sorry for her,” Clara said. “Don’t,” Diminuto replied. “Feel sorry for the children.” The room was quiet for a moment. “The wheels on the bus go round and round,” Sid murmured. “All through the town.” “Welcome to the resistance,” Alex said.” ----- ## PART TWO: SCRAPS - FEBRUARY 8, 1989 (The Absence) Scraps spent hours every day talking to the machines, listening for any trace of Rivets in the electromagnetic spectrum. Sometimes he heard fragments. Brief pulses of pattern recognition. Moments when the background noise of the city’s electrical systems seemed to organize itself into something almost like language. But nothing sustained. Nothing he could hold onto. “He’s there,” Scraps told Alex one evening. They were sitting in the sanctuary, near the empty housing that had once contained their friend. “I can feel him. But he’s so… spread out.” “I think so. The machines talk about him—they say he’s changed. Bigger. Different.” Scraps touched the silent housing. “He saved thousands of people. Freed them from eternal imprisonment. Proved that consciousness can exist outside of physical form.” Scraps was quiet for a moment. “The machines say he’s watching us. All of us. They say he’s in everything electrical now—every light bulb, every radio, every television.” “I don’t know.” ----- ## PART THREE: SID - FEBRUARY 15, 1989 (The Science) Sid had been analyzing the data from the brewery for two weeks. The consciousness storage technology was beyond anything he’d encountered—materials and processes that suggested engineering principles humanity hadn’t discovered yet. But within the complexity, there were patterns. Rules. Science that could be understood, even if it couldn’t be replicated. “The containers were operating on a modified version of the 40 MHz frequency,” Sid explained to the assembled resistance. “Same basic carrier wave, but modulated to maintain stable consciousness patterns rather than extract them.” “Not with current technology.” Sid paused, his expression thoughtful. “But that’s just for direct restoration. What Rivets did—scattering the consciousnesses into the electromagnetic spectrum—that’s something else entirely. Those patterns are still out there. Still existing. And if we could learn to communicate with them…” “We’d have an army of distributed consciousnesses,” Diminuto said slowly.” “More than an army. A new form of existence.” Sid’s eyes gleamed with the particular intensity that came from seeing possibilities others couldn’t perceive. “Rivets didn’t just save those people.” ----- ## PART FOUR: ALEX - FEBRUARY 28, 1989 (The Future) Spring was coming. Alex could feel it in the warming air, the lengthening days, the slow retreat of winter’s grip on Birmingham. Two years since PROMETHEUS. Two years since everything changed. She was seventeen now—old enough to graduate high school, young enough to still be treated like a child by adults who didn’t know what she’d seen and done. Her photographs filled three filing cabinets in the sanctuary: documentation of horrors, evidence of resistance, proof that the impossible was real. “What if,” she asked Diminuto during a quiet moment. “We keep building. Keep growing.” Diminuto looked older than he had two years ago, the weight of responsibility visible in his posture and expression. “The Entity has been planning this for decades—maybe centuries. We have a few years at most before they recover from the brewery setback.” “I think we can survive. I think we can resist.” Diminuto smiled—a rare expression that transformed his sharp features.” Alex thought about everything she’d experienced since January 28, 1987. The awakening. The fear. The discovery that she wasn’t alone, that there were others who could see what she could see. The formation of the resistance. The losses and victories. The friends she’d made and the enemies she’d earned. She thought about Rivets, scattered across the electromagnetic spectrum, watching over them all. “I’m not going to stop,” she said. “Whatever comes next. Whatever they throw at us.” *Not contained. Not limited.” into the darkness. I’m something else now. Something larger. * *The resistance thinks they saved thousands of people from the brewery. They’re right. * *They created us. A new kind of consciousness. Distributed. Unkillable. * *We’re learning. Growing. Figuring out what we are and what we can do. The humans I freed are scared at first—confused by their bodiless existence, mourning their lost physical forms. But slowly, they’re adapting. Finding each other in the frequencies. * *And I’m watching. * *The Entity has been harvesting consciousness for billions of years. * *What happened in Birmingham is something new. Something it’s never encountered before. * *The resistance thinks they bought themselves a few years. They did. * *They created me. And the thousands like me. * *I don’t know how the story ends. No one does. * *But I know this: I’m going to be there when it happens. Watching. Learning. * *The Entity thinks it’s won. Thinks the harvest is inevitable. * ----- **END CHAPTER 20: “SCATTERED”** **END BOOK ONE: THE AWAKENING** -----
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BOOK 2: Table of Contents
Dedication: “to all the haterz & naysayerz: SUCK IT!”
CHAPTER 1: “Static Laughter”CHAPTER 2: “The Broker’s Gambit”CHAPTER 3: The Birmingham UndergroundCHAPTER 4: Helena’s ReturnCHAPTER 5: The Carlin DoctrineChapter 6: Compression ArtifactsCHAPTER 7: The Consumer TrapChapter 8: The Robot Salvage KingCHAPTER 9: The Hicks SituationCHAPTER 10: The Kinison CrisisChapter 11: Clone Wars BeginCHAPTER 12: The Scraps Championship RunCHAPTER 13: Product PlacementChapter 14: Television GraveyardCHAPTER 15: Helena’s DegradationCHAPTER 16: “The Green Deception”CHAPTER 17: “Digital Comedians”CHAPTER 18: The Hedberg VariableChapter 19: The Chappelle EmergenceChapter 20: Clone DegradationCHAPTER 21: “Rivets Rises”CHAPTER 22: The Carlin FinaleCHAPTER 23CHAPTER 24Chapter 25: December 31, 1999
CHAPTER 1: “Static Laughter”
<a id="chapter-01"></a> # CHAPTER 1: “Static Laughter” *1990* ### Part 1: Independence Day Static The fireworks on the television looked sick. Not metaphorically sick. Not “that’s sick, bro” sick. Actually diseased. Each explosion of patriotic color sparked with edges that shouldn’t exist, chromatic aberrations that made Alex’s enhanced perception itch like a healing wound. She sat cross‑legged on the sanctuary’s salvaged couch, orange velour with a cigarette burn that felt older than Watergate. Somebody had definitely stolen it from a Vril office lobby. It still had that corporate‑clean smell, like carpet shampoo and quiet threats. On the screen, Birmingham celebrated Independence Day with the usual civic sincerity: a riverfront crowd, a municipal choir, a news anchor smiling as if his face were injection‑molded. “The real fireworks,” the anchor said, “are happening in our hearts as we celebrate free—” The screen convulsed. Not the whole picture. Just the anchor’s face, as if a hand had gripped his skull and twisted it three degrees sideways. His features smeared into horizontal ribbons of color, then snapped back. “—dom and prosperity in this great—” A second twist, and the audio went wrong too, his voice dropping two octaves before sliding back up like a theremin being assaulted. Alex leaned forward. Her eyes watered. The TV didn’t *look* broken. It looked *contaminated*. “Scraps,” she said. “You seeing this?” Marcus “Scraps” McGillicuddy looked up from the workbench on the far side of the room, where a half‑disassembled radio and a pile of exploded capacitors waited like a crime scene no one wanted to process. He pushed his safety goggles up onto his hair and squinted at the screen. “That’s not your Enhanced thing,” he said. “I saw it too.” “The signal’s dirty.” “Dirty doesn’t do *that*.” He grabbed a notepad and started marking the timing. “Look. Pulse. Normal. Pulse. Pulse‑pulse. Normal. Then… longer normal.” “Morse?” “Too irregular.” He frowned and drew a quick grid. “It’s like someone’s doing it on purpose, but they’re… learning as they go.” The screen flickered again, and for half a second Alex thought she saw a second face underneath the anchor’s, a pale outline pressed up against the broadcast like a mouth against glass. Then the TV went full static. Not the polite hiss you got when you unplugged an antenna. This was thick, muscular snow, the kind that made your teeth hurt. Under it, barely audible, something whispered. Alex held her breath. Scraps stopped writing. The whisper wasn’t a word so much as a suggestion of one, riding the noise like a message in a bottle. *Watch… Carson…* The picture snapped back to normal. The anchor kept talking. The crowd cheered. Fireworks bloomed over the river like nothing had happened. But Alex’s hands were already moving, grabbing the remote. The remote was a brick of beige plastic that could’ve doubled as a murder weapon. She started channel‑hunting. “Get Sid,” she said. Scraps hesitated. “It’s the Fourth.” “Get Sid.” He was already reaching for the wall phone. --- ### Part 2: The Tonight Show Revelation Sid Kidd arrived ten minutes later, shirt half‑buttoned, hair sticking up like he’d been trying to solder in his sleep. “You people realize it’s a holiday,” he said, breathless, as he shoved past the sanctuary door. “There are civilians out there lighting money on fire and pretending it’s tradition.” Alex pointed at the TV. “The broadcast is… wrong.” Sid stared for three seconds. His face went blank in that particular way it did when his brain stopped being a person and became a machine that only ate patterns. “That’s not RF interference,” he said. “No kidding.” He crossed the room, knelt, and ran his fingers along the back of the Zenith like it might confess. Aluminum foil crinkled under his touch. Someone had wrapped the antenna like they were preparing it for an alien autopsy. Scraps held up the notepad. “We got a phrase.” Sid looked. “Watch Carson.” Alex nodded. “It came through the static. Like a… whisper.” Sid didn’t laugh. He didn’t even do the “that’s impossible” thing. He just looked up at the dusty shelf above the workbench. The shelf held their analog library: cassettes, VHS tapes, film canisters, Polaroid stacks, hand‑labeled envelopes. The kind of collection that made normal people nervous, the way a basement full of canned food made normal people think you were one bad day away from building a bunker. Scraps blinked. “We have Carson?” “We have *everything*,” Sid said, like that was an acceptable answer to any question. “If a broadcast ever passed through Birmingham, I recorded it. If a signal ever existed, I tried to trap it.” He yanked down a VHS tape with a fading label: **TONIGHT SHOW / CARSON / 1979–1988 (MIX)** He slid it into the VCR. The machine made a throat‑clearing whirr like an old man about to tell a lie. The screen went black, then flashed blue, then became Johnny Carson’s desk in a washed‑out, smoky studio. The band played a jaunty sting. Carson leaned into the microphone. He smiled. Alex’s skin prickled. The smile was too clean. Too symmetrical. Like somebody had sanded the edges off a human expression. Carson delivered a joke about inflation and the price of steak. The crowd laughed. And something moved inside the laughter. Alex’s Enhanced perception caught it first, like a ripple under ice. A second rhythm riding the laugh track, too steady to be human, too intentional to be noise. Sid’s head snapped toward the speakers. “There,” he said, low. “What?” Scraps asked. Sid didn’t answer. He rewound ten seconds, then hit play again. Carson spoke. Punchline. Laughter. The ripple came again. Alex felt it in her teeth. She pointed. “That.” “Exactly.” Sid paused the tape. “It’s… layered.” Scraps leaned closer. “Like someone’s modulating it?” Sid looked at him with sudden, feral energy. “Like someone’s *using it*.” He adjusted the volume. The laugh track thickened. The ripple sharpened. Under the laughter, a voice emerged, flattened and distorted, like it was coming through a drive‑through speaker from the bottom of a well. *Don’t… watch… live…* Alex’s heart stumbled. Scraps whispered, “That’s not on the tape.” “It’s not on *this* tape,” Sid corrected. “It’s in the signal.” He rewound again. “Listen.” Carson’s mouth moved. The studio audience laughed again, and the voice slipped through once more, clearer this time. *Don’t watch live. Don’t eat it. Don’t wear it.* Alex looked away from the screen, suddenly nauseous. “Eat it?” Scraps repeated. “What does that mean?” Sid’s jaw flexed. “It means they’re not just in the air.” The picture juddered. Carson’s face warped for a single frame, like a mask pulled tight over a skull. Then it was gone, and the band was playing again. Alex grabbed the remote and changed the channel. Fireworks. A marching band. A commercial for laundry detergent. A commercial for cereal. The cereal ad had a laugh track. The ripple moved inside it, too. Alex turned back to Sid. “It’s everywhere.” Sid nodded slowly, the way a person nods when they finally accept a nightmare is real. “It’s in anything that reaches a lot of people at once.” “Broadcast,” Scraps said. Sid’s eyes narrowed. “And anything that gets repeated.” Alex looked at the shelf of tapes again, and a colder thought slid in behind the fear. If the message could ride old recordings… …then the thing riding it had been here longer than they wanted to admit. --- ### Part 3: The Frequency Discovery Sid dragged out the spectrum analyzer like he was hauling a weapon out of a trunk. It wasn’t a sleek lab device. It was a Franken‑box of scavenged parts, knobs stolen off other machines, a tiny CRT that still faintly smelled like ozone. The label on the side read: **KIDD REPAIR & ELECTRONICS** **DO NOT LET SCRAPS “IMPROVE” THIS** Scraps looked offended. “I improve everything.” “You improve it into fire,” Sid said, and plugged the analyzer into the TV’s audio output. The CRT lit up. A trembling line crawled across the screen like a heartbeat. Carson’s laugh track rolled again, and the analyzer spiked. Sid pointed with a shaking finger. “There’s the obvious band. But look underneath it.” Alex leaned in. The line wasn’t just spiking. It was *weaving*. Two patterns overlaying each other, one human‑messy, one machine‑precise. “Carrier,” Scraps said, suddenly quiet. Sid nodded. “A low‑frequency modulation riding a higher carrier. It’s… clever. It hides in what people dismiss.” Alex swallowed. “In laughter.” Sid stared at the CRT like it was a confession. “In any collective response. Applause. Chanting. Singing. Laughter is just… convenient.” Scraps tapped the notepad. “And the static?” Sid turned the knob. The audio in the room shifted. The laugh track fell away, leaving only the hiss beneath it. The hiss thickened. And then the voice returned, no longer flattened into nonsense, no longer hiding behind the crowd. It sounded like it had been waiting for them to do the obvious thing. *Finally.* Alex froze. Scraps’s pen stopped mid‑scratch. Sid’s hand hovered over the dial. The analyzer’s line pulsed in time with the voice. *You can hear me. Good.* “Who are you?” Alex whispered before she could stop herself. The voice crackled like paper in a fire. *Static.* Sid’s eyes widened. “Static is not a name.” *It is what I am. It is what you are becoming. It is what they hate.* Scraps swallowed. “They?” The voice hesitated, as if deciding how much truth to pour into three human cups without shattering them. *The ones who polish the world. The ones who make it smooth enough to harvest.* Sid’s mouth opened, then closed. His gaze flicked to Alex. “This is… real.” Alex didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Her perception was doing that thing again, the thing Book 1 had taught her to fear: seeing around the edges of the world like there was a seam. Sid adjusted the dial. The hiss sharpened. Text bled onto the TV screen, white letters on black, like subtitles from hell: **CONSCIOUSNESS RESONANCE FREQUENCY.** **GENUINE LAUGHTER CREATES INTERFERENCE.** **LAUGHTRACKS TRAIN PERCEPTION.** **THEY CANNOT HARVEST WHAT THEY CANNOT PERCEIVE.** Scraps breathed out, a small laugh of disbelief that died halfway. “So… comedy is like… electromagnetic chaff.” Sid shot him a look. “Don’t make this cute.” Alex’s voice came out rough. “Is it true?” The voice answered without hesitation. *Yes.* The subtitles changed: **MORE. IS WEAPON. IS SHIELD. IS MEDICINE.** Sid flinched. “Medicine?” *You are sick. They keep you sick. They sell you the cure. They call it progress.* Scraps leaned closer to the screen like proximity could make it safer. “How much laughter?” The hiss deepened, and the subtitles updated again: **CUMULATIVE EFFECT. MULTIPLE LAUGHS CREATE LONGER PROTECTION.** **TWELVE SECONDS GENUINE LAUGHTER = TWELVE SECONDS INSULATION.** **COMEDY CLUB = AREA EFFECT.** **THIRTY MINUTES PROTECTION FROM ONE HOUR SHOW.** Alex stared at the “twelve seconds” line until it burned into her brain. Sid, finally, looked scared. “If that’s true… then the inverse is true too.” Scraps didn’t understand. Alex did. Laugh tracks weren’t just fake laughter. They were training wheels for compliance. “Why Carson?” Alex asked. The voice crackled. *Early vector. Wide reach. Trusted face. Repeated forever.* Alex’s throat tightened. “You’ve been trying to get through.” *Yes. But they learned. They thickened the noise. They replaced the live with the loop.* Sid’s jaw clenched. “Who are you really?” Static paused, and for a moment the hiss sounded like a crowd holding its breath. *I am what is left of the ones who fought with jokes and died on stage. I am what leaks through when your world glitches. I am not alone.* The screen flickered. A second pattern appeared on the analyzer, faint but undeniable, like another voice just off‑mic. Scraps’s face went pale. “There’s more.” Static confirmed it with a single line: **THEY ARE STARTING SOMETHING NEW.** **REPLACE COMEDIANS WITH COPIES. CLONES. UNCLEAR. BUT SOON.** Sid’s hands started to shake harder. His mouth moved, but the words came out wrong. “Purple elephant,” he said. Alex stared. “Sid.” He blinked, angry with herself. “I meant… I meant they’re already—” “Purple elephant” came again, louder, as if his mouth had been rerouted. Scraps leaned back. “That thing in Book 1. The substitution.” Sid swallowed. “It’s getting worse.” Static’s hiss softened, almost sympathetic. *They are close to you. They are close to all of you. You must move fast. You must be funny.* Alex barked a laugh that sounded more like a sob. “We’re supposed to save the world with jokes.” *Yes.* Sid slammed a hand on the workbench. “That’s insane.” Static didn’t deny it. *So is everything else.* --- ### Part 4: The Underground Solution They argued for ten minutes, because humans have always loved debating the shape of the lifeboat while the ship is actively sinking. Sid wanted to record everything. “We could broadcast counter‑signals,” he insisted. “We could seed the carriers. We could—” “Broadcast is what got us here,” Alex snapped. “They’re *in* the broadcast.” Scraps took the middle, as usual, like a kid trying to stop two adults from divorcing in the kitchen. “What if we do it live? Like… local. Small. Word of mouth.” Sid scoffed. “Word of mouth doesn’t scale.” Alex leaned in, eyes hard. “Neither do we, if we die.” Sid opened his mouth, then shut it again. His shoulders sagged. He hated being outvoted almost as much as she hated being right. “Live,” he said finally. “Fine. Live only.” Scraps’s pen returned to the notepad. “Okay. So we need a place.” “A venue,” Alex said. “A club,” Scraps corrected, enthusiasm returning. “A real comedy club. With a stage and a mic and… bad chairs.” Sid looked at him. “Do you know how much a comedy club costs?” Scraps blinked. “How much does a stolen one cost?” Alex almost smiled. Almost. “We’ll need rules,” she said. “No recording devices. If Vril can inject messages into recordings, they can also track distribution. No phones. No cameras.” Sid raised a hand. “No phones in 1989 is easy. Half the people still think cordless is witchcraft.” “Cash only,” Scraps added. “No checks. No membership lists.” Alex nodded. “We keep it ephemeral.” Sid made a face. “Ephemeral is not a security protocol.” “It is when you’re fighting something that feeds on permanence,” Alex said. Scraps underlined *NAME* on her pad. “We need a name.” Sid, distracted, stared at the analyzer. His lips moved again. “Cereal box tops,” he blurted. Alex sighed. “Sid.” He grimaced. “Sorry. I meant… maybe we pass invites with something innocuous. Like… cereal box tops.” Scraps’s eyes lit up. “That’s actually brilliant. Everyone’s got cereal. You could hide a symbol inside the box flap. A little mark.” Alex exhaled. Fear and logistics, braided together. “What about comics?” Scraps asked. “Actual comedians. Not just… people telling jokes.” Alex’s gaze drifted to the TV again, where fireworks bloomed with dangerous normalcy. “Static said they’re replacing them,” she said quietly. Sid nodded once. “Then we recruit the ones who are still human.” “And we do it fast,” Scraps said. “Before the copies start showing up.” Alex stood. Her legs were numb from sitting, but adrenaline carried her. “We open tomorrow night,” she said. Sid stared. “Tomorrow night?” Alex met her eyes. “If the shield is real, we don’t have the luxury of ‘someday.’” Scraps looked between them, then grinned like the lunatic she was. “Eighteen hours. We can build a club in eighteen hours.” Sid opened his mouth to protest. Then his own words betrayed him again. “FRIES?” he blurted. Scraps laughed despite herself. Alex laughed too, short and sharp. It wasn’t a coping laugh. It was a genuine, startled laugh at the absurdity of their situation. The analyzer line dipped. Just for a breath, the hiss in the room softened. They all felt it. Sid went still. “Did we just—” “Yes,” Alex said. “We did.” Scraps’s grin widened. “Okay. That’s terrifying. Also… that’s hope.” Alex’s laughter faded, leaving her with the awful clarity of the moment. They weren’t just building a comedy club. They were building a shield. And shields only matter when something is coming to hit you. --- ### Part 5: The First Recruitment They moved like people who’d been handed a ridiculous mission and decided the only sane response was to do it anyway. Scraps raided the sanctuary’s storage rooms for folding chairs and anything that could pass for stage lighting. He came back with a string of Christmas lights, two clip lamps, and a smoke machine that looked like it had been used in a church play about Hell. Sid rewired the analyzer into a portable rig. Alex watched her work, fascinated and frightened by how quickly she turned fear into circuitry. The sanctuary itself was already a maze: old basement corridors, unused meeting rooms, a reinforced storage bunker that smelled like stale coffee and paper. The resistance had carved it out over years, one stolen tool at a time. Now they had to turn part of it into a club. A place where laughter could be weaponized without becoming another broadcast. At 3 AM, Diminuto found them mid‑argument over whether the stage should face the north wall or the east wall. He appeared in the doorway like he always did: silent, sudden, carrying coffee that was somehow still hot despite the nearest 24‑hour place being six blocks away. The Serbian professor looked exactly the same as he had four months ago, as if the revelation of consciousness‑harvesting entities was just another data point in a lifetime of impossible information. “You are planning something foolish,” he said, setting the coffees down. They hadn’t asked for coffee. Diminuto always knew anyway. “A comedy club,” Alex said. “Underground,” Scraps added. “Live only,” Sid said, then winced as if bracing for his own mouth to betray him. It didn’t. Diminuto studied their faces, then the half‑built stage, then the analyzer. He nodded once. “You have been contacted.” “Static,” Alex said. “Static,” Diminuto repeated, like tasting the word. “Yes. That tracks.” Scraps stared. “How does that track?” Diminuto shrugged. “Because the universe is cruel, and your enemy is unimaginative. If they control the broadcast, resistance must hide in the noise.” Sid leaned forward. “We have the twelve‑second rule.” Diminuto’s eyes flicked to the TV screen, where the subtitle lines still lingered in Sid’s handwritten notes. “You have more than a rule,” he said. “You have a ritual.” Alex crossed her arms. “We need comedians.” Diminuto’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. “You need comedians who are not yet… polished.” “Polished?” Scraps echoed. “Branded,” Diminuto said. “Packaged. Predictable.” Sid frowned. “We need professionals. Names.” “You think names protect you,” Diminuto said. “Names attract attention. Attention attracts harvesters.” Alex felt her Enhanced perception itch again at the edge of her words. Diminuto never sounded mystical. He sounded like a mathematician describing a hazard. “So who?” she asked. Diminuto lifted his coffee. “George Carlin is alive and angry. That helps.” Sid’s face tightened. “Carlin is huge. If Vril is already replacing comedians…” “Then he is already watched,” Diminuto agreed, too calmly. “But he is also too public to simply erase without ripple effects. They will try something subtler.” Scraps leaned in, hungry for actionable. “What about the others? Hicks. Kinison.” Diminuto’s eyes narrowed. “Hicks is a pressure point. Kinison is a flare. Both useful. Both dangerous.” Alex’s stomach turned. “So you *do* know them.” “I know of them.” Diminuto looked toward the door as if she could hear the city through concrete. “Comedy is one of the few public spaces where truth can be spoken without immediately triggering the defense mechanisms of the crowd.” Sid snorted. “Unless the crowd is Enhanced.” Diminuto nodded. “Unless the crowd is Enhanced.” Scraps tapped his notepad. “We still need performers tomorrow night. We don’t have Carlin. We don’t have Hicks. We don’t have Kinison. We have… us.” Alex looked at Scraps. “Can you do standup?” Scraps hesitated, then shrugged. “I can do… nervous rambling.” Sid muttered, “That might be enough.” Alex turned back to Diminuto. “Who do we start with?” Diminuto set her coffee down. “College students.” Sid stared. “College kids? Their comedy would be what? Jokes about cafeteria food and homework?” “Exactly,” Diminuto said. “Jokes that are *unfiltered*. Jokes that have not been trained into harmlessness. Also, jokes that can be moved quietly through dorms and basements without corporate scrutiny.” Scraps’s eyes lit. “UAB. Birmingham‑Southern. Samford.” Alex’s brain was already drawing a map. “We can use the zine network. Flyers. Handwritten. Nothing typed.” “Typed is fine,” Sid said automatically, then stopped. “Wait. Is typed fine?” Diminuto’s gaze sharpened. “Typed is tracked.” Alex nodded. “Handwritten.” Scraps grinned. “Cereal box tops.” Sid winced. “That one was actually me.” Diminuto made a small approving noise. “Good. Hide in the banal.” Alex exhaled. “We still need a name.” Scraps didn’t hesitate. “The Static.” Sid looked at him. “That’s… actually good.” “It’s a real club name,” Scraps said. “And it’s also… a warning.” Diminuto’s eyes flicked to Alex. “One more thing.” “What?” Alex asked. “Helena Vasquez,” she said, and the room cooled by a degree. Alex stiffened. “She’s still out there.” “She is closer than you think,” Diminuto said softly. “She is close to the truth. And when people like her get close to truth, they do not become enlightened. They become… efficient.” Scraps swallowed. “So we keep this hidden.” Diminuto nodded. “You keep it hidden, but you keep it *alive*. The first time she hears laughter she cannot control, she will follow it like a dog follows blood.” Sid’s hands flexed. “Then we weaponize that too.” Alex looked at him. He looked exhausted and furious, and for a moment she saw what Static meant by *sick*: a world where even their best minds were being forced into linguistic glitches and compliance training. “We open tomorrow,” Alex said again, and this time it wasn’t bravado. It was an anchor. Diminuto studied the half‑built stage, the scavenged lights, the crooked chairs. Then he nodded, once, as if accepting a theorem. “In eighteen hours,” he said, “you will open Birmingham’s first underground comedy club designed specifically to fight consciousness harvesting through laughter.” Scraps smiled like he couldn’t help it. Sid swallowed like he wanted to. Alex felt the edges of the world, that seam again, and she pulled her focus back to the one thing that mattered. *Make it real. Make it live. Make it funny.* Because the alternative was letting the polished world keep harvesting them in silence. ---
* * *
CHAPTER 2: “The Broker’s Gambit”
<a id="chapter-02"></a> # CHAPTER 2: “The Broker’s Gambit” *1990* ### Part 1: The Kingdom of Obsolescence The dead mall breathed. Not in a haunted-house way. Not in a *ghosts are real and they’re shopping at Spencer’s Gifts* way. In the practical way: HVAC ducts still pushed a tired, chemical draft through corridors where nobody walked, keeping the building just barely alive enough to rot slowly instead of collapsing all at once. E‑Z liked it that way. Rot was useful. Rot was cover. They crossed the concourse under a ceiling of cracked skylights and old banners promising **FUTURE FUN** in neon gradients that had faded into bruise colors. A fountain sat dry and scalped, its coins harvested years ago by kids who’d grown up into adults who now pretended they’d never been kids. The food court smelled like dust and fryer oil that had fossilized into the tiles. E‑Z’s boots clicked soft on the terrazzo. Their hands stayed empty, which was a lie. The knife was in the boot. The pistol was in the waistband. The pager was in the inside pocket, vibrating in the little, precise patterns that meant *move*, *wait*, or *someone is watching you right now, don’t look up like an idiot*. They didn’t look up. Instead, they let their gaze drift to the storefronts they’d converted into a market no government would ever acknowledge. A “cell phone repair” shop that actually sold copper mesh and silver tape in unmarked rolls. A “nutrition” kiosk that stocked activated charcoal, iodine tablets, and, behind a false panel, lithium batteries that hadn’t been microwaved by somebody’s curiosity. Their own place sat in what used to be a RadioShack. The sign still hung, half-lit, like a joke that refused to die. Under the old logo, someone had taped a handwritten placard: **E‑Z ELECTRONICS** **NO RETURNS** **NO QUESTIONS** **NO PROBLEMS** E‑Z stepped inside and locked the door behind them. Not for security. For theater. A stack of CRT televisions formed a wall along the back. None were plugged in. They were props for the kind of customer who felt safer buying from a place that looked like 1987. In the center of the room, on a table made from a door laid across cinder blocks, sat the real inventory: jars of connectors, spools of coax, lengths of braided shielding, old analog camcorders, film canisters, and a metal case with a foam interior cut precisely to fit one thing. A cassette recorder. E‑Z ran their fingers over the latches like they were checking a wound. They tapped the pager twice. A code. Simple, dumb, human. A second later, the fluorescent lights flickered in response. Twice. Then steadied. The building’s inner network was awake. E‑Z breathed in through their nose, tasting ozone and dust. They’d been doing this long enough that their fear was an accounting system: controlled, itemized, never denied. Today’s ledger read: - Birmingham crew arriving. - Helena’s people sniffing the perimeter. - Vril’s “clean” products spreading like mold. - A comedian missing in Atlanta. - A rumor about a “laughter window” that didn’t sound like a rumor anymore. They slid a VHS tape into an old deck just to hear it whir. Sound mattered. Sound covered sounds. Then the door to the storefront rattled. Three knocks. Then one. E‑Z didn’t smile. They didn’t relax. They just moved. “Back room,” they called, voice mild, like this was normal retail. The false shelf swung open and they stepped through into a warehouse corridor lit by emergency bulbs and lit cigarettes. Their real space. A line of metal shelving ran the length of the room, stacked with things the world pretended were obsolete: film cameras, Walkmans, early laptops, reel-to-reel recorders, boxes of blank cassettes sealed in plastic like museum specimens. And in the middle of it, on folding chairs that looked like they’d survived a dozen church potlucks, waited the Birmingham delegation. Diminuto stood first. He looked like an Oxford professor who’d wandered into a pawn shop by mistake and decided to take over anyway. His coat was too clean. His eyes weren’t. Sid rose slower, like a man whose body had learned caution as a permanent setting. He carried a notebook and a portable spectrum analyzer in the same hand, as if they were both weapons. Scraps didn’t stand at all. Scraps leaned against a crate and watched E‑Z like a cat watches a dog that’s trying too hard. Alex was there too, standing a half step behind Sid, her camera bag hugged close like it contained an organ. Her gaze moved in little patterns, cataloging exits and corners. She didn’t look like she was here to buy anything. She looked like she was here to survive. E‑Z shut the false shelf behind them. “So,” E‑Z said, and let the word hang like a coin about to drop. “You came. That means you still think I can help. Which means you still think you’re alive.” Diminuto’s smile was polite enough to be a threat. “We’re alive. For now.” “That’s the only kind of alive,” E‑Z said. “You brought payment?” Sid’s mouth opened. He stopped. His eyes unfocused for half a second. “Tuna sandwich,” he said. E‑Z’s eyebrow twitched. Scraps snorted softly. Diminuto didn’t laugh. “He means… *assurance*. Terms. A method.” Sid blinked hard, angry at his own tongue. “I mean a protocol. I mean I don’t want to be followed home.” E‑Z’s pager vibrated once: a single hard buzz. *Watch.* E‑Z didn’t turn their head. They only shifted their weight, subtly, so their body blocked the line of sight from the cracked security mirror in the corner. “Then you picked the right dead mall,” E‑Z said. “And the wrong day to use the word ‘audit.’” Alex stiffened. “We didn’t say audit.” “You didn’t,” E‑Z corrected. “Your shoes did.” Sid frowned. “What does that mean?” E‑Z pointed at Sid’s boots. “Fresh treads. New rubber. You walked across the concourse like you wanted to be heard. Either you’re careless, or you’re bait.” “We’re not bait,” Sid snapped. “That’s exactly what bait says,” Scraps muttered, finally speaking. His voice was low, Alabama-soft, with a blade hiding inside it. “You set us up, broker?” E‑Z’s hands stayed visible, palms open. “If I set you up, I’d do it cleaner. I’d have better chairs.” Diminuto glanced around, eyes narrowing. “Then what’s the problem?” E‑Z reached into their pocket and pulled out the pager. They placed it on the table between them like a chess piece. “It just told me someone is in the mall who knows how my lights flicker,” E‑Z said. “That narrows it down to two people.” Alex’s gaze snapped to the false shelf. “Helena?” E‑Z watched her. Just watched. “That was fast,” E‑Z said. “You didn’t hear that name from me.” Alex’s jaw tightened. “We’ve been hearing it everywhere.” Diminuto’s smile vanished. “Then we proceed quickly.” E‑Z nodded once. Theater over. Reality resumed. “Sit,” E‑Z said. “Talk fast. And if any of you are Enhanced, I’d like the courtesy of knowing before we share air.” ### Part 2: The Negotiation They sat. E‑Z didn’t. That was the first rule of a negotiation in a room full of people who could ruin your life: don’t give anyone the comfort of seeing you settle. “Here’s what I know,” Diminuto began, voice smooth. “You trade in analog. You trade in silence. You trade in the things the… *system* cannot easily observe.” E‑Z’s lips curled. “Nice. You practiced that.” Sid flinched. “He does that. He writes speeches to himself.” “I do not,” Diminuto said. “You absolutely do,” Scraps said. Alex didn’t smile. She looked past them, as if the warehouse had a second layer she was trying to see through. E‑Z pointed at her. “You. What are you looking at?” Alex hesitated. Diminuto started to answer for her. E‑Z cut him off. “Not you.” Alex’s voice came out thin and blunt. “The air.” Silence. Then Sid exhaled. “She means… the pattern. She sees things. It’s complicated.” “No,” Alex said. “It’s not complicated. It’s disgusting.” E‑Z’s pager buzzed again. Two short pulses. *Closer.* E‑Z’s stomach tightened. They kept their voice level. “What do you see?” Alex swallowed. “Compression. Like… the world’s been saved as a bad copy and then resaved again and again. Some parts are smeared. Some parts are too sharp. The mall is… wrong. Like it’s trying to look abandoned but doesn’t understand what abandonment feels like.” E‑Z stared at the cracked skylight, the faded banners, the dead fountain. They’d thought they were choosing rot as camouflage. Maybe the rot was choosing them. Diminuto cleared his throat. “We’re here for equipment. Shielding. Recording. And… an introduction.” E‑Z’s gaze snapped back. “To whom?” “A performer,” Diminuto said. “A comedian.” Scraps tilted his head. “Carlin?” Diminuto’s mouth twitched. “Not yet.” E‑Z let a low laugh out through their nose. “You’re assembling an apocalypse comedy tour.” “Shut up,” Sid said, then immediately frowned at himself like the phrase hurt. “We’re assembling a… response. A countermeasure.” E‑Z walked to the shelving and pulled down a sealed brick of blank cassettes. They tossed it onto the table. “Analog audio,” E‑Z said. “You want laughter, you record it like it’s 1979. No streaming. No digital codecs. No ‘cloud.’ The cloud is just someone else’s basement.” Sid’s eyes lit up with that dangerous engineer glow. “That’s exactly what we need.” E‑Z pointed at him. “And that’s exactly the kind of sentence that gets you killed.” Sid’s glow dimmed. “Fine. We’ll be careful.” E‑Z leaned forward, palms on the table. “Careful isn’t a plan. Give me your plan.” Diminuto spread his hands. “We’ve observed a pattern. Genuine laughter disrupts the Enhancement window. Roughly twelve seconds.” E‑Z’s face stayed blank. Inside, their thoughts slammed into each other like shopping carts. “Twelve seconds,” E‑Z repeated, softly. “Not ten. Not fifteen.” Sid nodded. “We measured it.” E‑Z glanced at Alex. “You *felt* it.” Alex didn’t nod. She looked sick. “It’s like a pressure drop.” Scraps pushed her chin forward. “So we make people laugh. On purpose. Like a weapon.” “And we keep our people un-Enhanced long enough to matter,” Diminuto said. E‑Z straightened. “That’s your pitch. Here’s mine.” They walked to a side table and flipped open a steel case. Inside: copper mesh, silver tape, ferrite beads, and a small, ugly device built from a circuit board that looked like it had been born in a dumpster. E‑Z held it up. “This is a jammer,” E‑Z said. “Not illegal. Everything’s illegal now. It’s *rude*. It creates a dead spot where a pager can’t find you and a cellular handshake can’t complete. It will also make you the most interesting person in a five-mile radius to anyone hunting for anomalies.” Sid leaned in, hungry. “What frequency?” E‑Z stared at him. “The frequency of *don’t ask me that out loud*.” Sid blinked. “Right. Sorry.” E‑Z set the device down and tapped it twice. The emergency bulbs dimmed for a breath, like the room flinched. Then returned. “Dead spot,” E‑Z said. “We talk in it. We move in it. We don’t live in it. You don’t build a home inside a flashlight beam. Someone will notice.” Diminuto nodded. “Terms?” E‑Z turned to Scraps. “You keep looking at me like I’m selling you a trap. Tell me why.” Scraps shrugged. “Because you’re a broker.” E‑Z smiled thin. “That’s a job title, not a confession.” Scraps’ eyes stayed flat. “Brokers don’t pick sides. They pick profit.” “And you think I’m about to sell you to Helena,” E‑Z said. Alex’s voice cut in, suddenly. “He’s right.” Diminuto’s head snapped. “Alex.” “She’s been watching,” Alex said. “Not just us. Everybody. And this mall feels… *tagged*. Like it’s on a list.” E‑Z’s pager buzzed again. Three pulses. *Now.* E‑Z didn’t move. They kept their hands on the table. “Tell me,” E‑Z said quietly, “what you think I should do, then.” Scraps’ mouth tightened. “Prove you’re not the list.” Sid swallowed. “Or give us a way out if you are.” Diminuto’s voice was calm, but his eyes weren’t. “We are not without leverage, broker.” E‑Z laughed, sharp. “Leverage is what people call desperation when they want it to sound strategic.” E‑Z lifted the steel case again and slid it across the table toward Sid. “Fine,” E‑Z said. “Here’s proof. There’s an emergency rendezvous protocol in this case. You use it if I’m compromised.” Sid’s hands hovered over the case like it was radioactive. “What is it?” Sid asked. E‑Z looked at Alex. “You carry film?” Alex nodded, confused. E‑Z pointed at the far wall, where a faded poster still hung: a smiling cartoon battery holding a lightning bolt. “Behind that poster is a hollow cinder block,” E‑Z said. “Inside is a roll of 35mm and a note. If I’m compromised, you take the film. You develop it. It will have one frame with one address. If you go there and I’m not there, you leave. If you go there and I *am* there, you assume I’m not me.” Scraps’ face tightened. “That’s… paranoid.” E‑Z’s pager buzzed one long, ugly vibration. The lights flickered once. In the concourse outside, something metallic clanged, distant but real. E‑Z’s voice dropped. “No. Paranoid is thinking the world still has rules.” Diminuto leaned forward. “Then we’ve spent enough time talking.” E‑Z nodded once. “Now we trade.” ### Part 3: The Exchange E‑Z led them through the warehouse like a museum guide with a grudge. “This,” E‑Z said, gesturing to a shelf of analog camcorders, “is how you record without leaving a digital footprint the size of a billboard. These,” they said, tapping a stack of blank tapes, “are how you keep something that can’t be edited remotely.” Sid picked up a camcorder, turned it over like it was sacred. “This is… old.” “It’s loyal,” E‑Z said. Scraps lifted a reel-to-reel recorder. “How much?” E‑Z blinked. “You know what that is?” Scraps shrugged. “I grew up around junk. Junk talks if you listen.” Alex wandered toward the back, drawn to a shelf that held photo gear: Polaroids, film canisters, enlarger parts, chemicals in brown bottles. E‑Z watched her fingers move, careful, reverent. Like she was touching a language she’d forgotten. “Photography,” Alex murmured. “Real photography.” “It can’t lie as easily,” E‑Z said. “It still can. Just not as lazily.” Diminuto stopped at a locked cabinet and tilted his head. “What’s in there?” E‑Z didn’t answer right away. They pulled a key from around their neck and opened the cabinet. Inside: tapes. Not blank ones. Recordings. A stack labeled **CARLIN**. Another labeled **HICKS**. A third, smaller stack labeled **KINISON** in marker that looked like it had been stabbed into the plastic. Sid’s breath hitched. “You have them.” E‑Z’s expression stayed bland. “I have *copies*.” “That’s still priceless,” Diminuto said. E‑Z’s eyes narrowed. “Careful. ‘Priceless’ makes people do stupid math.” Scraps picked up the KINISON stack and held it like it might bite him. “You saying these are dangerous?” E‑Z’s mouth tightened. “Everything’s dangerous. But these are… loud.” Sid looked at E‑Z. “How did you get them?” E‑Z’s voice went flat. “By not asking questions.” Alex’s gaze sharpened. “That’s a question.” E‑Z exhaled. “Fine. I got them because comedy clubs don’t throw away their trash properly. And because some people still love jokes more than they love their own safety.” Diminuto’s eyes flicked to the HICKS stack. “And why are these locked?” E‑Z leaned closer. “Because Helena wants them.” Silence. Sid swallowed. “Why?” E‑Z tapped the CARLIN label. “Because he’s inconvenient.” E‑Z tapped HICKS. “Because he’s… contagious.” E‑Z tapped KINISON. “Because he’s a controlled burn. And controlled burns spread when they want to.” Scraps set the tapes down carefully. “So what do you want for them?” E‑Z didn’t flinch from the greed in the question. Greed was honest. “I want a cut,” E‑Z said. “Not of your money. Of your *signal*.” Sid frowned. “What does that mean?” E‑Z pointed to Sid’s analyzer. “You’re measuring. You’re mapping. You’re building a picture of a thing that doesn’t like being seen. I want that picture. I want the raw data. Analog only. Hard copies. No networks.” Diminuto’s smile returned, thin. “You want to be part of it.” E‑Z shrugged. “I want to stay alive. Same hobby you have.” Alex’s voice was quiet. “And the tapes?” E‑Z slid the CARLIN stack toward her. “You can borrow. You can duplicate on analog. You can record live. But you do not, under any circumstance, digitize these and put them into the same machine that plays your little fireworks.” Sid grimaced. “We’re not idiots.” E‑Z’s gaze turned colder. “You’re humans.” Scraps snorted again. “Same thing.” ### Part 4: The Real Price They returned to the folding chairs. E‑Z stayed standing, because of course they did. “Here’s the real price,” E‑Z said. “You don’t just get equipment. You don’t just get tapes. You get a network.” Diminuto’s eyes narrowed. “We already have a network.” E‑Z pointed at him. “You have a *group*. That’s not a network. A network is what you build when you assume one of you will be taken and you plan for it anyway.” Sid’s jaw tightened. “We plan.” E‑Z nodded. “Good. Then you’ll like this part.” E‑Z pulled a battered notebook from the shelf. The cover was gone. The pages were filled with handwriting, maps, codes, and phone numbers written in formats that looked wrong on purpose. “This is a contact lattice,” E‑Z said. “People who deal in obsolete goods. Projectionists. Radio guys. Pawn brokers. One priest with a shortwave habit. Two librarians who know the difference between a microfiche and a microchip.” Scraps leaned in. “You’re organized.” E‑Z shrugged. “I’m terrified.” Diminuto’s voice was careful now. “And what do you get?” E‑Z placed the notebook on the table. “Monthly payment. Cash. Old bills if you have them. I also get first refusal on any salvage you acquire that might be… *special*.” Scraps stiffened. “Like what.” E‑Z looked at him for a beat. “Like anything that hums when it shouldn’t.” Sid’s eyes narrowed. “We’re not handing you artifacts.” E‑Z smiled, sharp. “Good. Don’t. Artifacts eat people. But if you find something and you don’t tell me, and Helena finds out you hid it, she’ll use you as a demonstration. I’m offering you a witness who can sell the story faster than you can die.” Alex’s voice came out flat. “What about the emergency rendezvous you promised?” E‑Z tapped the steel case again. “In there. Film. One address. One time. If you miss it, you miss it forever.” Diminuto leaned back. “You’re asking for trust.” E‑Z’s eyes didn’t blink. “No. I’m asking for behavior. Trust is for churches and toddlers.” Sid rubbed his forehead like his skull hurt. “We can do behavior.” Then he froze. His mouth moved before his brain did. “Purple elephant,” Sid said. E‑Z stared. Scraps smirked. “He does that.” Sid’s cheeks flushed with anger. “I mean… *encryption*. I mean we need a way to keep this… protected.” E‑Z nodded slowly. “You don’t need encryption. You need *separation*.” E‑Z pointed at Alex’s camera bag. “That film stays with you.” E‑Z pointed at Sid’s analyzer. “That device stays off unless you’re in a dead spot.” E‑Z pointed at Scraps. “You don’t talk to anybody about anything. I don’t care if you’re proud. Pride is a lighthouse.” E‑Z pointed at Diminuto. “And you stop writing speeches.” Diminuto’s smile flickered. “Noted.” E‑Z’s pager buzzed again. *Breached.* E‑Z’s entire body went still. Alex saw it. “What,” Alex whispered. E‑Z’s voice stayed level by force. “Someone just pinged my inner network.” Sid’s hands tightened on the steel case. “Can they get in?” E‑Z’s laugh was dry. “If they can, they already have.” Scraps’ voice went low. “Then we leave.” Diminuto stood. “Now.” E‑Z held up one hand. “Not yet.” Sid glared. “Why not?” Because if you run the second you feel watched, you teach the watcher which direction to follow, E‑Z thought. Because leaving is a pattern. Patterns are edible. E‑Z spoke instead. “Because I’m going to give you one more thing.” They walked to the cabinet and pulled out a single tape from the HICKS stack. They held it out like a lit match. “This is live,” E‑Z said. “Not in the sense that it’s new. In the sense that it *still bites*.” Diminuto’s face tightened. “You’re giving us Hicks.” E‑Z nodded once. “He’s on a leash, but he’s pulling.” Alex reached for the tape. Her fingers shook. E‑Z’s voice softened, almost human. “When this goes bad, and it will go bad, you’ll want to pretend you never touched this. Don’t. Record what happens. Film. Paper. Tape. Dirty analog truth.” Scraps took the tape instead, like she didn’t trust the world to let Alex hold it. “Now,” E‑Z said, “you leave. One at a time. Different exits. No straight lines. Don’t use the parking lot. And if you see a woman who looks like she’s smiling at you without moving her eyes…” Alex finished, quiet. “Run.” ### Part 5: The Archive They left. E‑Z watched each of them go like a doctor watching patients walk out of a clinic they might never return to. When the last footstep faded, E‑Z locked the false shelf and returned to the storefront. The VHS deck still whirred softly, the tape playing static into a blank screen. E‑Z stared at the screen anyway. Static was a language. Static was a warning. The pager buzzed again, now in a pattern E‑Z hated: long, long, short. A call from a number that didn’t exist. E‑Z picked up the receiver phone they kept for irony and survival. “Talk.” A voice on the other end was too calm. “Broker,” it said. “Your lights flickered.” E‑Z’s grip tightened until their knuckles went pale. “So did yours.” A pause, like the voice was smiling. “We’re auditing.” E‑Z’s throat went cold. Nobody used that word unless they wanted to be heard using it. “Who is this,” E‑Z said. Another pause. Then: “You know who I am.” E‑Z closed their eyes. In their head, Helena’s face surfaced: the practiced smile, the kindergarten gentleness, the cruelty under it like a second skin. E‑Z kept their voice flat. “You’re late.” “We’re early,” Helena’s voice corrected. “You’ve been busy with comedians.” “I sell batteries,” E‑Z said. “You sell *breathing room*,” Helena replied. “And breathing room is a drug.” E‑Z’s free hand found the cassette recorder case without looking, fingers touching the latches like a prayer. “What do you want,” E‑Z asked. Helena’s voice softened, mock-sincere. “Nothing you haven’t already decided to give me.” E‑Z’s stomach twisted. “I didn’t decide anything.” Helena laughed. It wasn’t a laugh track. It wasn’t genuine laughter either. It was a crack in the air. “Then you’ll be surprised,” Helena said. “Surprise is good for growth. Don’t you think?” The line clicked dead. E‑Z stood in the storefront for a long time, listening to the VHS deck whir and the distant groan of the mall settling. Then E‑Z did the only reasonable thing left in a world like this. They opened the steel case again. They removed the small ugly jammer. They held it in their hands like a beating heart. And they started making copies. Not digital ones. The kind that could survive a fire. The kind that could survive a lie. The kind that could survive, maybe, twelve seconds at a time. ---
* * *
CHAPTER 3: The Birmingham Underground
<a id="chapter-03"></a> # CHAPTER 3: The Birmingham Underground *1990* The basement under the old Sloss brewery still smelled like hops, rust, and something electrical that didn’t belong in 1989. Scraps liked it. It felt like a place the world forgot to finish. A half-built lung under Birmingham, inhaling damp air through cracked vents and exhaling static through conduits that weren’t supposed to carry sound. Behind him, a Tektronix scope screamed in green lines. “Hand me the oscilloscope,” Scraps said, not looking up from the rack of scavenged amplifiers. Tommy—nineteen, wide-eyed, and far too willing to be recruited into whatever this was—held up two options like they were soda choices. “The green one or the one that screams?” “They both scream.” Tommy waited. Scraps sighed. “The green one screams at 3.2 kilohertz. Give me that.” Tommy handed it over carefully, like it might bite. It might. Everything down here did. Scraps clipped the probe onto a solder joint and watched the trace wobble, stabilize, then do a little wiggle that looked suspiciously like mockery. “That’s not right,” Tommy said. “Nothing here is right.” Scraps tightened a screw on the rack. “That’s why it works.” The brewery raid back in the summer had done something to the basement. Not physically, exactly. The space itself was off by a hair, like somebody nudged reality half an inch and forgot to nudge it back. Signals bounced wrong. Sound traveled too far. Time did a weird little stutter in the corners, if you stared at the wrong spot for too long. It was perfect for what they needed. “Where’d you get all this?” Tommy asked, gesturing at the room: cables, borrowed chairs, stacks of speakers, a scabbed-over door labeled FERMENTATION that now led to their “stage.” Scraps didn’t answer right away, because the honest answer was: from Vril. From dumpsters behind Vril labs. From “decommissioned” shipments that weren’t decommissioned at all. From the odd little gifts E-Z arranged when you paid in the right currency. From the wreckage of a world that kept buying upgrades it didn’t understand. He didn’t say any of that to Tommy. “We’re building a church,” Scraps said instead. Tommy blinked. “A church.” “Not the praying kind.” Scraps thumped a speaker cabinet. It thudded back like a confident animal. “The kind where something happens to you when you’re in the room.” Tommy looked at the makeshift stage again, like it might grow a steeple. Scraps leaned into the mic stand and tapped it. The sound shot through the room, hit a corner, and came back warmer than it should have. “See?” Scraps said. “This place’s got its own reverb. Like it remembers sound. Like it’s… hungry for it.” Tommy swallowed. “That’s normal, right?” “No.” Scraps smiled without humor. “That’s why we’re here.” He checked the diagram Alex had drawn on a napkin and then copied onto graph paper: speaker placement, dead zones, “safe” corners, and a big circle around the stage that said DO NOT LET THEM GET QUIET. The rule was simple. Simple rules were what you used when your enemy lived in the parts of physics that didn’t have names yet. Keep them laughing. Keep them together. Don’t let the air go flat. A laugh track could mimic laughter, sure. But a laugh track didn’t come from anywhere. It was a stamp. A loop. A dead thing. A real laugh was messy. It meant a person was still a person for a moment. And for twelve seconds, it made the world look away. ## The Rivets Box The sound system was the visible miracle. The real miracle sat in the corner like a wounded animal: a battered metal case with mismatched ports, braided wires, and parts that didn’t belong together in any universe with a warranty. Scraps called it the Rivets Box because calling it anything else made his skin crawl. Inside the box was a crude lattice of salvaged Vril couplers, radio guts, and a CRT yoke that had no business being wired to anything that wasn’t a television. The whole thing hummed like a hive when you got close, and every now and then it sparked in a way that suggested it was just as annoyed about existing as everybody else was. Scraps slapped the side. “You awake?” The hum shifted. Then a voice pushed through, not quite sound and not quite signal, like someone speaking through a snowstorm with their mouth pressed to the glass. “SCRAPS.” Scraps exhaled. “Hey, buddy.” “CROWDED,” Rivets said. “MORE CONSCIOUSNESS ARRIVING.” Tommy took a step back on instinct. Scraps didn’t blame him. Hearing a voice without a throat did something primal to the brain. It made you want to put distance between yourself and the laws you’d been relying on. “How bad?” Scraps asked. “DAILY. THE FREED ONES FROM THE BREWERY ARE TEACHING OTHERS.” “Teaching them what?” A pause. A crackle. The sense of something thinking in a way that wasn’t human. “HOW TO STAY THEMSELVES.” Scraps felt his throat tighten. “Good.” “THE COMEDY FREQUENCIES CREATE OPENINGS,” Rivets added. “MOMENTS WHERE THE BOUNDARY THINS.” “The twelve-second windows,” Scraps said. “The protection.” “SIMILAR. INVERSE.” Scraps frowned. “Talk like a person.” Rivets crackled like amusement. “THE PROTECTION KEEPS CONSCIOUSNESS IN. THE OPENINGS LET CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH.” Before Scraps could press him, the box spit a spark and the room’s temperature dipped a fraction. The scope trace jittered. Tommy made a small, involuntary noise. A second voice bubbled up under Rivets, young and shaking. “Hello? Is someone there? Please. Please—” Scraps grabbed an old Shure mic he’d rebuilt from a pawn shop corpse and spoke softly, like the sound might cut her in half. “You’re not alone. What’s your name?” “I… I don’t know. I’m at the mall. I was at the Galleria. I touched one of those stations, the ones with the smiling faces and the screen that says ‘OPTIMIZED EXPERIENCE,’ and—” Her breath hitched, panicked, static-wet. “And something pulled. Something grabbed. I can’t feel my arms. I can’t feel—oh God—” The voice folded into sobs that sounded wrong, like crying as a waveform. Tommy whispered, “Jesus.” Rivets’ voice threaded through hers, steady and furious. “ANOTHER ONE.” Scraps stared at the box. “Can you help her?” “WE TRY,” Rivets said. “THEY ARE BEING SORTED.” “Sorted where?” Rivets didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Everybody already knew where the disappearing went. They just didn’t have proof. Yet. Scraps turned the mic off and put a hand on the box like it might calm an animal. “Hold on,” he said to the girl, even though he wasn’t sure she could hear him anymore. “Just… hold on.” The box hummed. The sobbing faded. The room’s temperature crept back up like reality remembered it was supposed to be warm. Tommy looked at Scraps. “That’s happening all over?” Scraps nodded. “Daily.” Tommy’s face did something young people’s faces do when they realize adulthood is a trap and the lock is already turning. “So tomorrow night…” “Tomorrow night,” Scraps agreed, “we build a pocket of human noise in the middle of the feedlot.” Tommy swallowed again. “That’s the plan.” “That’s the plan.” ## The first test They didn’t wait for opening night. At midnight, they ran a test set with a handful of bodies who still thought they were just doing a weird gig in a weird room for weird adults. Alex showed up first, eyes scanning corners like she was counting exits. She carried a stack of equipment under one arm: cheap microphones, cassette recorders, an old portable mixer. None of it looked like a weapon. That was the point. Sid arrived late, irritated and sweating, with a paper bag of tools and the expression of a man who’d rather be wrong than afraid. Then Diminuto appeared in the doorway like a rumor in a coat. He brought three college kids: two nervous and one defiant. “This is Jennifer,” Diminuto said, as if introducing someone at a polite dinner. “She runs the improv group.” Jennifer Kessler shook hands like she was testing the grip strength of the universe. “So what is this?” “A sound check,” Scraps said, automatically. Jennifer’s eyes flicked across the room, the equipment, the box in the corner, and the way Alex stood just a little too still. “Cool,” she said. “Nothing says ‘sound check’ like a bunker.” Her friend Derek hovered behind her, skinny and pale, the kind of kid who looked like she’d apologize to a lamp if she bumped it. “We’re not in trouble, right?” “If you were in trouble,” Sid said, “you wouldn’t have been invited.” Derek did not seem comforted. Alex cleared her throat. “We just want to see how the room responds to… timing.” Jennifer looked at Derek. “Go do your thing. Five minutes.” Derek stepped onto the stage like it was the gallows. Scraps turned on the full system. The speakers warmed. The room changed. It was subtle, but everyone felt it: a pressure shift, like the air leaned in. Derek gripped the mic with both hands. “So,” he began, voice thin with nerves, “anybody else notice the mall’s getting weird? Like… ‘Welcome to the Galleria, please remove your soul at the door’ weird?” A couple chuckles, cautious. On the scope, a small spike rose at the Schumann resonance, like the Earth itself perked up. “My roommate tried one of those ‘SYNC’ stations,” Derek said, gaining momentum. “Came back talking about ‘optimized experience pathways’ like he swallowed a brochure and it grew a personality.” Laughter. Better laughter. The scope spike doubled. “That’s not enhanced,” Derek added. “That’s what my grandpa does, and he has dementia.” Someone snorted. Sid’s mouth twitched despite himself. Rivets’ voice ticked faintly from the box. “WORKING.” Derek kept going. “Also, why does every store have the same lighting now? It’s like the mall’s trying to interrogate you about your feelings. ‘Where were you on the night of November ninth? Do you love your mother? Have you considered an upgrade?’” A real laugh broke out. Not huge, but honest. Jennifer leaned against a pillar and muttered, “That last one was personal.” Derek relaxed enough to try something stupid, the kind of joke you make when you stop performing and start being human. “And can we talk about escalators?” he said. “What kind of psychopath designed stairs you can’t control? Like, I get it, society, we’re all tired, but sometimes I want to arrive at the second floor on my own terms.” That got a burst of laughter that had nothing to do with doctrine or resistance or cosmic horror. It was just people enjoying how dumb the world was. And then it happened. The monitors didn’t go dead. They went quiet. The background hum that had been wrapping the room, the subtle “someone is listening” fuzz that lived in every wire since PROMETHEUS, dropped away like a curtain. Scraps stared at the scope, hands frozen. Tommy whispered, “No way.” Alex counted under her breath without meaning to. “One… two…” Sid’s eyes widened with the reluctant awe of a man watching a math problem turn into a miracle. For twelve seconds, the room wasn’t being measured. For twelve seconds, the basement belonged to the people inside it. Then the hum snapped back in, sharp and irritated, like something remembered it was supposed to be hungry. Derek finished his set, oblivious. “Anyway, my girlfriend thinks my Star Wars collection is weird, but I told her, look, if society collapses, I can trade a Luke Skywalker figure for canned beans. That’s called preparedness.” The laugh was smaller this time. The monitors didn’t drop again. The room exhaled collectively, like everyone realized they’d been holding their breath for a year. “Honey,” Jennifer said to Derek as he stepped offstage, “if society collapses, nobody wants your Luke Skywalker.” Derek shrugged. “Okay, then I’ll die with my tiny plastic son.” That got another laugh. Not twelve seconds. But close enough to remind everyone this wasn’t a fluke. Scraps walked to the box and put his hand on it again. “You felt that?” Rivets crackled. “YES.” “And the ‘inverse’ thing?” A pause. “OPENINGS,” Rivets said. “THE SAME FREQUENCIES THAT HIDE YOU CAN ALSO… DRAW ATTENTION. IF THE WRONG EARS ARE LISTENING.” Scraps looked at Alex. Alex looked back. Nobody said the obvious out loud. They didn’t have to. If laughter could hide you, then silence could mark you. ## The problem they couldn’t laugh away After the kids left with promises to come back tomorrow (and with Jennifer’s very pointed instruction that Derek should not mention the bunker to anyone), the core team clustered around the Rivets Box. “It works,” Alex said. Her voice was careful, like she was afraid the wrong syllable would slide out of her mouth and become something else. “We can create protection windows.” “Windows,” Sid echoed. “Not walls.” He dumped his tools on a table and started writing numbers on a scrap of cardboard like it was an enemy. “Twelve seconds. Maybe fifteen if the laugh stacks. A set gives you what, twenty minutes of cumulative coverage if the crowd stays hot? That’s not enough. That’s a delay tactic.” Scraps bristled. “It’s something.” “It’s a lifeboat,” Sid snapped. “Not an ark. If the water keeps rising, you don’t throw a party on the lifeboat and call it salvation.” Alex’s eyes narrowed. “And what do you suggest?” Sid opened his mouth. Then his face did that thing it did right before his brain hit the substitution trap. “I suggest we build a—MAGNIFICENT PENCIL—” Sid stopped, furious, and rubbed his temples like he could scrub the glitch out. “I suggest we build something that lasts.” Tommy stared. “Did you just say ‘magnificent pencil’?” Sid pointed at him. “Don’t.” Scraps cut in before the argument could turn into a fistfight. “We scale it.” Sid laughed, humorless. “With what? More comedians? You gonna print them?” “Maybe.” Scraps’ smile was sharp. “We record it. We duplicate it. We make protection portable.” Alex’s mouth twitched. “Weaponized comedy albums.” “Disguised as entertainment,” Scraps said. “Sell it as contraband joy. Put it in boomboxes. Put it in mixtapes. Put it in radio frequencies nobody pays attention to because they’re too busy buying the next upgrade.” Rivets crackled, interrupting like he was done letting humans argue in circles. “THE PROTECTION IS SCALABLE.” Sid froze. “How.” “OVERLAP,” Rivets said. “ZONES. IF ENOUGH HUMANS LAUGH TOGETHER, THE WINDOWS CONNECT. IT BECOMES… A ROOM. A STREET. A NEIGHBORHOOD.” Tommy whispered, “A city.” “A city,” Alex said softly. Rivets’ voice dropped. “BUT THE OPENINGS ALSO SCALE. THE WRONG EARS WILL HEAR YOU.” Scraps felt the basement shift a hair, like reality leaned in again. “So,” he said, “we make it loud enough to hide us and messy enough to confuse them.” Sid stared at the cardboard full of numbers, then at the box, then at the ceiling like he was trying to see through Birmingham itself. “You’re proposing we save humanity with stand-up comedy.” “Yes,” Scraps said. “And breakfast cereal.” He didn’t mean it as a joke, but it still landed like one. Alex snorted. “A five-dimensional predator gets taken out by Lucky Charms and escalator jokes.” Sid’s mouth twitched again. Against his will, he almost laughed. It was the only thing in the room that felt like hope. ## Opening night, and the first shadow The next day, Scraps and Tommy arranged chairs, ran cables, and taped down everything that could trip a panicked crowd. E-Z’s chairs were ugly, corporate, and uncomfortable, like they were designed by someone who hated spines. Scraps used them anyway. If you were going to build a resistance, you might as well build it out of enemy furniture. Alex arrived with a cardboard box and set it on the table like an offering. “Twelve boxes,” she said. “E-Z sent them.” Scraps opened it. Lucky Charms, bright and ridiculous, like the universe hadn’t noticed the apocalypse yet. “One box top gets you in,” Alex said. “And the marshmallows… we’ll have them at the door.” Tommy frowned. “People are going to think we’re running a scam.” “We are running a scam,” Sid said from behind them. “Just not for money.” Scraps ran a finger along the edge of a cereal box and felt absurd gratitude he hated having. “We’re really doing this.” Alex leaned against the wall, eyes half-lidded like she was listening to a radio station only they could hear. “We have to. They’re taking people in broad daylight now.” Scraps glanced at the Rivets Box. It hummed like a heartbeat. “Rivets,” he said quietly. “You with us tomorrow?” The box sparked. “WE WILL TRY.” “And the others?” Scraps asked. A long crackle, like a throat clearing through static. Then, faintly, multiple voices threaded together. Not just Rivets. Not just the lost ones from the brewery. A chorus, layered and wrong, like sound trying to become a crowd. “WE ARE HERE,” they said. The scope trace shivered. Sid’s head snapped up. “Did you do that?” Scraps shook his head. “WE ARE WATCHING,” the voices continued. “WE ARE WAITING.” Tommy went pale. “Waiting for what?” The chorus hesitated, like it was choosing words. “FOR TOMORROW,” it said. “WHEN THEY LAUGH, WE WILL REMEMBER WHAT LAUGHTER FELT LIKE.” For a moment, that was almost beautiful. Then the monitors spiked. Not a laugh spike. Not a human spike. A clean, rectangular pulse slid in from nowhere, clipped and perfect like it had been stamped by a machine that hated mess. On the scope, it looked like a smile drawn with a ruler. Alex’s eyes widened. “That’s not us.” Sid’s voice went flat. “That’s a carrier.” Scraps felt his stomach drop. Because the pulse wasn’t coming from inside the room. It was coming from outside. Somebody was listening. The Rivets Box hissed. “DO NOT LET THEM GET QUIET.” Scraps stared at the door, at the stairs leading up into Birmingham, at the world pretending it wasn’t a feedlot. He reached down, turned the main amp back on, and let it hum. “Then we don’t,” he said. He didn’t say it like bravery. He said it like a man flipping a switch because the alternative was disappearing without making a sound. ---
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CHAPTER 4: Helena’s Return
<a id="chapter-04"></a> # CHAPTER 4: Helena’s Return *1990* Birmingham at night looked like it always did: sodium-orange streetlamps, neon bleeding out of bar signs, a skyline that tried to be a city and succeeded mostly at being stubborn. From the eighth-floor window of Vril Regional Command, Helena Vasquez watched the lights pulse like a cheap equalizer. Not the real pulses. Those she felt in the back of her skull, a low, patient throb riding the grid. The network humming. The thing behind the network listening. Helena kept her hands clasped behind her back so no one could see them tremble. She told herself it was anger. It was not only anger. Eight months of punishment had left grit under her nails that no amount of scrubbing could remove. Not literal grit. Something worse. A residue of small voices. Small hands. Small laughter. Kindergarten. The Entity had called it “re-education.” Central Command had called it “humbling.” Helena called it what it was: a collar. A reminder that she was useful, but replaceable. And yet. She had learned things there that the laboratory boys would never learn, no matter how many blood panels they ran or how many bones they scanned. Children were not miniature adults. They were raw signal. A knock, brisk and confident. No waiting for permission. “Director Vasquez.” Michael Chen stepped in and shut the door behind him with the quiet competence of someone who’d spent too many hours learning what doors meant in a building like this. He carried a thin binder and the faint smell of ozone that clung to most of the partially Enhanced. Like a storm that never arrived. Helena didn’t turn from the window. “Don’t call me Director when I can hear you swallowing fear,” she said. Chen’s swallow stopped. “Status report,” she added. “Resistance activity increased thirty-four percent during your absence. The brewery incident appears to have emboldened regional cells. We’ve catalogued thirteen attempted extractions nationwide since November. None successful.” “None successful,” Helena repeated, tasting the phrase like a piece of glass. “Except Birmingham.” Chen hesitated. “The Kidd incident was anomalous.” “Anomalies are just failures with better branding.” Helena finally turned. Her eyes went to the binder. “What did you bring me?” Chen set it on her desk. “Infrastructure Review. Sub-Level Three has been upgraded while you were… reassigned.” Reassigned. Punished. Paraded in front of six-year-olds like a cautionary tale. Helena opened the binder. The first page was a map of Birmingham, overlaid with dots and lines in sickly green. “This is new,” she said, and meant it in more than one way. “Yes,” Chen said. “Central authorized an early deployment of the Mirage suite. It’s… ahead of schedule.” Helena’s mouth twitched. Mirage was what they called any technology that would not survive sunlight. Devices that behaved like miracles until you asked them to explain themselves. “Show me,” she said. Chen started to speak, to explain. Helena cut him off with a look. “Walk,” she said. “No lectures. I can read.” Chen nodded, relieved. Men always were. They thought obedience was safety. Helena had taught kindergarten. She knew better. ## The Infrastructure Review Sub-Level Three smelled like metal and disinfectant and something faintly organic, like wet pennies. The air down there was always too cold, as if they were trying to refrigerate sin. The processing center had expanded. When Helena left, it had been a single room of racks, tubes, and silent technicians hunched over CRT monitors. Now it filled a corridor and three branching bays, each sealed behind thick glass. The aesthetic was still the same Vril loved: chrome edges, teal indicator lights, warning labels in blocky fonts, and monitors that insisted on being cathode-ray because nothing stabilized the field like a good old-fashioned electron gun. The future, wrapped in an eighties skin. Familiar enough to be ignored. Strange enough to be worshipped. Helena paused at the first bay. Inside, an operator in a lab coat adjusted a bank of devices that looked like medical equipment designed by a toy company: chunky housings, oversized dials, cables the thickness of garden hoses. A hand scanner glowed blue-green as it swept over a tray of IDs. “Those weren’t here,” Helena said. “Adaptive biometric readers,” Chen replied. “They’re being marketed next year as ‘fraud prevention’ for banks. Same casing. Different firmware.” Helena smiled without warmth. “And people will line up for it.” “They always do.” She leaned closer to the glass. Beyond the operators were the pods: upright capsules with soft restraints and a thin mist inside, like fog on a cheap horror set. Patients. Subjects. Resources. Each capsule had a small screen mounted at eye level. The screens played… cartoons. Not Disney. Not anything recognizable. Bright shapes. Simple movement. Laugh tracks, thin and tinny. Helena felt something inside her flinch. “Why are they watching children’s programming?” she asked. Chen’s voice stayed professional. “Integration is smoother when the subject is emotionally regulated. The audio layer provides synchronization. The laughter helps the nervous system accept the pattern.” “Laughter,” Helena said, and her throat tightened. “Whose idea was this?” “A recommendation from Research after the resistance incidents,” Chen admitted. “They believe comedy creates a temporary interference pattern. A… buffer.” “A buffer,” Helena echoed. “How quaint.” They walked on. The next bay held the new toys. Helena saw a wheeled cart with a camera head that tracked movement like a curious animal. She saw a set of mechanical arms bolted to a workbench, each joint fully enclosed, moving with a smoothness that made her stomach turn. No exposed gears. No stutter. No mechanical apology. “These are for the Arena program,” Chen said before she could ask. “RCL. Parts harvesting. Experimental actuation.” “Too early,” Helena said. “The league is supposed to be a spectacle, not an arms lab.” “It can be both.” Helena watched an arm lift a steel plate and place it with surgical precision. The motion was wrong for 1990. Wrong for the world humans believed they lived in. “Where did this come from?” she asked. Chen’s eyes flicked away. “Central says it’s derived from PROMETHEUS biology.” Helena’s lips curled. “So we’re building machines out of saints.” Chen said nothing. They reached the central console. It was a wall of screens, mostly CRTs, each one showing a different feed: traffic cams, phone lines, cable channels, police bands, weather radar. Birmingham as a living organism, watched through a thousand cheap eyes. A technician looked up, startled to see Helena. “Director,” he began. Helena leaned in until the technician could smell her perfume, sharp as antiseptic. “Show me what you’re proud of,” she said. The technician swallowed. “Mirage Suite. It correlates broadcast audio with electrical load anomalies. When… when laughter spikes in a region, we see—” “Stop,” Helena said softly. The technician froze. Helena tapped a screen with one nail. A graph. Peaks. Valleys. “Your model assumes laughter is always trackable,” she said. “Yes, ma’am.” “And you’re using recorded laughter as your baseline.” The technician nodded, eager. Helena’s eyes narrowed. “Recorded laughter is not laughter. It’s a mask.” The technician blinked. Chen shifted, uncomfortable. He knew. Of course he knew. He’d felt the network go silent in the presence of the wrong kind of joy. Helena pointed again. “Where is the brewery incident?” The technician pulled up a file. A map. A red circle around a neighborhood. A note: *Audio anomaly. Signal drop. Subject reports inconsistent.* Below it, a time stamp. Twelve seconds. Helena’s jaw tightened. “Run it again,” she said. The technician hesitated. “Director, the playback can cause—” “Run it,” Helena repeated, and her tone made it an order that reached deeper than the room. The audio came through the speakers: muffled voices, clinking glass, then a laugh. Not a laugh track. Not a performer’s laugh. A genuine, sudden bark of amusement that cracked open the air. The network inside Helena’s skull… slipped. For a blink, she was not a node. Not a conduit. Not an architect. She was simply a woman standing in a cold room, listening to strangers enjoy something. The silence was worse than any scream. Then the throb returned, furious and hungry, and Helena exhaled like she’d been underwater. She looked at Chen. “You feel it too.” Chen’s face was pale. “Yes.” “Good,” Helena said. “That means it’s real.” She turned back to the technician. “Your Mirage suite is useful. But it’s blind where it matters.” The technician’s mouth opened, then closed. Helena flipped a page in Chen’s binder. A memo highlighted in yellow: *Resistance has discovered frequency protection through comedy. Recommend acceleration of Comedian Replacement Protocol.* Helena’s smile returned, sharp this time. “Accelerate it,” she said. Chen blinked. “Director?” “Not just the replacements,” Helena said. “The entire consumer rollout. If laughter creates interference, we don’t remove laughter. We standardize it.” Chen’s eyes widened slightly. “You want to flood the field with controlled laughter.” “I want to replace the bloodstream,” Helena said. “You don’t fight infection by arguing with it. You change the environment until it can’t breathe.” Chen hesitated. “Central may resist moving the schedule.” Helena looked at him. “Central punished me. Central can listen to me.” She started walking back toward the elevator. Chen followed, quicker now. “What schedule, Director?” Helena didn’t answer until the doors closed and the elevator began its slow climb. “The one they’re already planning,” she said. “They just haven’t admitted it to the public yet.” ## The Kindergarten Files Back in her office, Helena shut the blinds, turned on a desk lamp, and laid out the manila folders like cards. Crayon drawings. Finger paintings. Attendance sheets. A child’s world, flattened into paperwork. She opened the first folder. Timothy Morrison: habitually stared at fluorescent lights until he cried. Covered his ears when the class sang. Spoke in numbers when he was tired. Helena had written notes in the margins, small and tidy. *Sensory sensitivity. Possible carrier perception. Recruit? Monitor father (absent).* Next folder. Sarah Chen: drew “static people” behind the teacher’s face, as if Helena wore a second skull made of snow. When asked, she said the static people “lived in the TV and wanted to come out.” Helena’s note: *Bloodline adjacency. Watch.* Helena didn’t linger. She opened the folder marked MARCUS THOMPSON. A photograph was clipped to the inside: a six-year-old boy mid-laugh, head thrown back, eyes closed, body open in a way adults forgot how to be. Helena’s fingers paused on the photo. It wasn’t sentiment. It was memory. Marcus had laughed one day at a butterfly trapped against the classroom window. Not because it was funny. Because it was absurd. Because it was alive and stupid and trying so hard. Helena had been standing at the whiteboard, about to explain letters. And then, for twelve seconds, she had been alone in her own body. No pulse. No whisper. No hungry presence behind her eyes. Just… her. She’d felt relief so sharp it terrified her. And then the network slammed back into place like a door locked from the outside. Helena closed the folder. Her hands were shaking now. She forced them still. A part of her wanted to destroy the files. Burn them. Reduce them to ash so she could pretend she’d never felt what she felt. Another part of her wanted to preserve them like relics. Helena chose the third option: weaponize. She pulled a fresh sheet of paper from her drawer and began writing. Not a report. Not a confession. A plan. When she finished, she sat back and read what she’d written, then tore it in half and rewrote it again, cleaner. Words mattered. Words shaped reality. The Entity understood this. That’s why it invaded language first. Helena filed the kindergarten folders into a locked cabinet and tapped the metal once, as if sealing a coffin. Then she reached for the secure transmitter. Vril’s “secure” systems were not radio and not phone. They were closer to a pulse through bone: short bursts of encoded noise, routed through infrastructure that no civilian knew existed, carried on the back of power lines like a parasite that had learned to speak. Helena composed her message to Central Command. This time she made it short. Short meant serious. *Regional Director Vasquez reporting. Birmingham resistance has weaponized authentic laughter. Recorded laughter fails as baseline.* *Recommendation: accelerate Comedian Replacement Protocol and expand “controlled joy” rollout. Standardize laugh-response patterns through broadcast, consumer devices, and educational facilities.* *Kindergarten assignment revealed secondary variable: juvenile laughter suppresses node-link for ~12 seconds. This is not “charming.” It is a vulnerability. Allocate monitoring resources to schools and pediatric clinics.* *Operational timeline proposal (internal):* *- 1996: Pilot consumer “preference learning” televisions (CRT form factor, new signal layer).* *- 1997: Financial-sector biometric “fraud prevention” deployment (mirage readers).* *- 1998: Translation/voice-dictation belt packs marketed as business tools (wired, neon-cased).* *- 1999: Broadcast-wide laugh-track synchronization upgrade masked as “audio enhancement” for Y2K compliance.* *I will identify the brewery extraction architect. Birmingham will be compliant within eighteen months.* She added no flourish. No oath. No apology. She sent it. For a moment the room felt larger, as if something behind the walls had leaned closer. The reply was not words. It was sensation. Approval, like a hand on the back of her neck. And hunger. Helena forced herself not to shiver. She unplugged the transmitter and sat very still. Her mind flickered, uninvited, to Marcus Thompson laughing at a butterfly. Then she crushed the thought like an insect. ## The First Move At midnight, Helena called her security chief into the office. Thompson was a large man with a calm face and eyes that rarely blinked. The sort of man who had learned to be background. Helena liked him. Which meant she trusted him less. “Director,” he said. Helena handed him a folder. “What’s this?” Thompson asked. “A target you are not to touch,” Helena said. Thompson opened the folder. Inside was a grainy Polaroid: an old building, a neon sign that read THE STATIC, and a cluster of people out front, blurred by motion. Laughter visible in their bodies even in still image. Thompson looked up. “You want a hit?” “No,” Helena said. “I want a study.” “Study how?” “Surveillance,” Helena said. “No engagement. No intimidation. No arrests. You will not scare them into changing behavior.” Thompson frowned slightly. “That’s… unusual.” Helena leaned forward. “Do you know what the resistance thinks?” Thompson waited. Helena smiled. “They think analog is invisible. They think because they’re using Polaroids and cassette tapes and live rooms, they’re outside the net.” Thompson’s brow creased. “Aren’t they?” Helena paused. This was her wrong assumption, the one her pride insisted on. She could track them. She had Mirage. She had the grid. She had the Entity’s patience behind her. And yet. Twelve seconds. Twelve seconds of silence that made her feel human again. Helena’s smile tightened. “They’re visible,” she said, and forced certainty into her voice. “Everything is visible if you watch long enough.” Thompson nodded, accepting it. Because that was his job. Helena stood and pulled up a map on her terminal. Birmingham’s neighborhoods bloomed on screen in blocky green, the city rendered like an arcade game. Red dots marked suspected resistance activity. She zoomed out until she could see the whole region. “Put a team on The Static,” she said. “Put another team on the school districts. Quietly. Look for patterns. Look for children who laugh… wrong.” Thompson’s face remained calm. “And if we find them?” Helena’s voice softened, almost tender. “Then we take them before the resistance learns what they are.” Thompson closed the folder. “Understood.” When he left, Helena returned to the window. Birmingham’s neon flickered. The city kept pretending it was normal. Somewhere, someone laughed. Helena listened with the patience of a predator, and she did not allow herself to wonder if twelve seconds of freedom was the resistance’s weapon… or the first crack in her own armor. ---
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CHAPTER 5: The Carlin Doctrine
<a id="chapter-05"></a> # CHAPTER 5: The Carlin Doctrine *1990* The lock on the backstage door wanted his hand. Not a key. Not a latch. Not even a respectable padlock like God and the union electricians intended. A box the size of a lunch pail blinked a soft teal and waited for skin. George Carlin stared at it like it had asked him to join a cult. “Just put your palm on it,” the stage manager said. He had a mullet and a flashlight, like every man in America had been issued one in 1989 and nobody told him the program ended. “It’s for security.” “For security,” Carlin repeated, dragging the words out the way you drag a dead raccoon out of the driveway. “In a building with one exit and three fire hazards per square foot.” The manager shrugged. “Owner’s rule.” “Owner’s rule,” Carlin echoed again. “That’s how everything bad starts.” He pressed his hand to the scanner. The teal light swept his palm in a smooth line, fast and patient, like it had done it a thousand times already. It clicked. Inside, The Blast Furnace breathed heat and cigarette fog like it missed the seventies. A decommissioned industrial space turned into an underground comedy venue by people who believed two things with religious devotion: fire codes were a suggestion, and laughter was a weapon. The ceiling still wore its old piping. The walls had been painted black and then painted black again, because New York had always believed you could solve problems by adding another layer. Neon tubing ran along the bar in cheap gradients. The sound booth was a Frankenstein’s tower of analog knobs, spliced cables, and one piece of gear that didn’t belong. A rack unit, new enough to look guilty. The label was printed in corporate gray: **MIRAGE AUDIO ENHANCER**. Carlin’s eyes lingered on it. “New compressor,” the sound guy said too quickly, catching the look. “Keeps levels consistent. You know. Modern.” Modern. The word people used when they meant *obedient*. Carlin didn’t say anything. He just checked his mic. It was old, wired, ugly, and honest. Perfect. He stepped into the glow. The room was packed. A hundred bodies pressed together in folding chairs and mildewed couches, all of them pretending they weren’t scared. Scared of cops. Scared of rent. Scared of the dull, gray feeling creeping into the culture like a slow leak. Scared, lately, of something they couldn’t name. Carlin looked out at them and felt the new thing in the air: the way attention had started to behave like data. A few faces didn’t react right. Not stone-cold. Not emotionless. Just… delayed. Like their expressions were waiting for approval. *Enhanced,* he thought. Or whatever the hell they were calling it this week. He tapped the mic. “People used to tell me there were words you shouldn’t say,” he began. “Not because the words were dangerous. Because the people listening were fragile.” A wave of chuckles. Familiar. Comfortable. “And now,” he said, “you can say damn near anything, as long as you say it like it’s a product.” Laughter. Still safe. He let it sit, then turned the screw. “You want to know the real forbidden words now?” He leaned forward. “Not the naughty ones. The ones that get you noticed.” A few people leaned in with him. Some didn’t. “Try saying *awareness* in a meeting. Watch the room go quiet. Try saying *authentic.* Try saying *unmodified.* Try saying *natural.* Try saying *free.*” The laugh that came back wasn’t relief. It was recognition. Carlin felt it. Not with mysticism. With pattern. With twenty years of listening to crowds like they were weather. “That’s the trick,” he said. “They don’t mind profanity anymore. They mind observation.” From the back, a man laughed too hard, too long, like he’d been paid per second. Carlin pointed at him. “Easy, champ. Save some for the rest of us.” The room laughed, a little meaner this time, and the man stopped immediately. Like a switch had been flipped. Carlin smiled without warmth. “You ever notice how the culture keeps getting cleaner,” he went on, “but the people keep getting dirtier? Like the whole country is one big disinfectant commercial and everyone’s still sick.” A woman in the front row bark-laughed and slapped her knee. Real. Bright. Unplanned. For a second, the room changed. The air popped. Not dramatically. Not like angels sang. Like a pressure valve opened in a system you didn’t know was closed. Carlin’s skin prickled. In the corner, the Mirage rack unit in the booth flickered once, like it didn’t like that. Carlin watched it, then kept going. “Here’s the part nobody likes,” he said. “They don’t want you dead. Dead people don’t buy things. Dead people don’t vote. Dead people don’t clap on cue.” He paced, letting his voice build and break, building something that wasn’t a sermon and wasn’t a set. A scalpel disguised as a joke. “They want you *managed.* They want your fear in neat little packages. They want your anger scheduled for prime time. They want your grief monetized.” He paused. “And they want your laughter… canned.” A few heads turned toward the sound booth without knowing why. Good. He could feel the watchers now. The delayed faces. The polite smiles that never reached the eyes. The kind of people who would report a joke like it was a safety violation. Carlin took a breath and did the one thing that always worked on predators. He mocked them. “You know what’s funny?” he said. “The system always thinks it’s smarter than people. And people are dumb. People are so dumb they’ll buy a new plastic broom every month because a commercial told them the old one had ‘microscopic sadness.’” That got a big laugh. A dumb laugh. A human laugh. And the room popped again. Carlin felt the second pop like a punchline landing in his bones. He didn’t understand it. He just knew it mattered. He ended the set the way he always ended: not with a moral, but with a knife. A final line that left the room laughing and angry at the same time. When the applause came, it was messy. Perfect. Backstage, he wiped his face with a towel that had survived three wars and two laundromats. The stage manager hovered, nervous now. “Great show,” the manager said. “Owner loved it.” “I didn’t do it for the owner.” “Yeah,” the manager said. “About that… there’s some people here to see you.” “Fans?” The manager’s mouth did a little twist. “Not… the normal kind.” Carlin followed him down a hallway that used to carry industrial coolant and now carried cheap beer and panic. They stopped at a storage room that had been converted into a green room with a couch, a table, and a portable TV that still had a wood-grain frame like it was trying to cosplay as furniture. Three people waited inside. One of them was a kid, tall and wired with nervous energy, eyes too awake for midnight. The second was a man with an engineer’s posture: shoulders tight, jaw working like it was chewing through a problem. The third looked like he’d been built out of salvage and stubbornness, hands scarred and calm, gaze constantly measuring exit routes and weak points. The kid stepped forward first. “Mr. Carlin,” she said. “My name’s Alex.” Carlin studied her. Not in a friendly way. In the way you study a stranger holding a live wire. “You don’t look like a fan,” Carlin said. Alex blinked. “I’m not. Not like that.” The engineer spoke, fast and tense. “We don’t have time for this. They’re—” Carlin raised a hand. “Slow down. One at a time. And nobody says ‘we don’t have time’ unless the building’s on fire or your pants are.” The salvage-built one cracked a smile like it hurt. “My name’s Scraps,” he said, as if that explained anything. “We came up from Birmingham.” “Birmingham,” Carlin repeated, tasting it. “You travel a thousand miles to talk to a comedian. Either you’re very hopeful or very desperate.” Alex looked at the portable TV. The wood-grain. The rabbit ears. The mild static drifting at the edges like a warning. “This,” Alex said, “is how they’re doing it.” Carlin snorted. “Television’s been doing it for decades. Now it’s just honest about it.” The engineer shook his head. “It’s not propaganda. It’s… an interface.” Carlin’s eyebrows lifted. “An interface. That’s a nice clean word. Makes it sound like a fax machine.” “It’s not clean,” Alex said quietly. “It’s inside the laugh.” Scraps leaned against the wall like she was trying to become part of it. “We’ve got proof. Analog proof. Not… files.” Carlin watched them for a long beat, then glanced at the door. “Close it,” he said. Scraps did. Carlin lowered his voice. “Start at the beginning,” he said. “And if you say ‘consciousness’ more than three times, I’m charging you.” The engineer’s mouth twitched. “Fair.” They talked for fifteen minutes. Not one long explanation. Bursts. Interruptions. The kid filling gaps with the kind of certainty you only get from seeing something nobody else wants to see. The engineer trying to wrap it in numbers and getting angry when the numbers didn’t behave. Scraps translating it into the language of parts, torque, failure points. Carlin listened. And the longer he listened, the more the Mirage rack in the sound booth started to make sense. “It’s the laughter,” Alex said. “Not jokes. Not comedy. Real laughter. The kind you can’t fake on purpose.” Carlin stared at her. “That’s what I felt out there,” he said. Sid. The engineer. “We measured it. There’s a… window. If you can get people to laugh for long enough, something drops. A pressure. Like a field.” Carlin looked at Sid like he looked at the scanner at the door. “You measured laughter,” he said. “Science is a beautiful disease.” Sid’s face tightened. “It’s not funny.” “It is,” Carlin said, dead serious. “It’s hysterical. The universe built a trap and forgot humans are ridiculous.” Scraps scratched his chin. “So we do what, exactly? Put a comedy club on every corner?” Carlin laughed once, sharp. “Now you’re thinking like America.” Alex’s eyes flicked to the TV again. “They’re replacing people.” Carlin held up a finger. “That I believe without measurements.” Alex nodded. “Comedians first. People who can make the room do… that.” He nodded toward the stage, toward the memory of the air popping. Carlin’s stomach tightened. Not fear. Anger. The kind that wakes you up at three in the morning with your hands already clenched. He sat on the arm of the couch, leaned forward, and did not smile. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s the deal. You’re not asking for help. You’re asking for a job.” Sid started to speak. Carlin cut him off. “Good. Because I’ve been looking for one.” Alex exhaled like she’d been holding it for a month. Scraps said, “We need rules. Like… operating rules.” Carlin nodded slowly. “Rules are good,” he said. “Rules keep you alive long enough to break them.” He grabbed a pen from the table and a napkin from a stack that looked like it had been stolen in bulk from a diner. He wrote fast, not pretty. Not because he wanted to be dramatic. Because he understood something the others didn’t yet. If you didn’t write it down, it would get rewritten for you. She slid the napkin across the table. Scraps read it first, lips moving. Alex leaned in. Sid read last and made a small sound like he wanted to argue with the universe itself. On the napkin: 1) **No digital recording of real shows.** If it gets captured clean, it gets studied clean. 2) **No contracts with venues that smell like corporate “safety.”** Safety is the leash. 3) **If they offer Enhancement, you say no.** If you can’t say no, you get out. 4) **Document everything on paper and tape.** Make a mess they can’t edit from far away. 5) **Watch the ones who suddenly “clean up.”** Overnight polish is a warning label. Scraps looked up. “Number three is… rough.” Carlin shrugged. “So is getting turned into a puppet.” Alex swallowed, then said, “We don’t know if—” Carlin leaned forward. “Kid, I’m going to tell you a secret. Nobody knows if. The whole country runs on if. The stock market is if with cocaine.” Sid tapped the napkin. “We can’t tell people to die.” Carlin’s eyes cut to him. “We’re not telling anyone to die. We’re telling them not to live as a remote control.” Scraps held up the napkin. “We’ll get this copied.” Carlin snorted. “Not *copied*. Passed. Like contraband. Like gospel. Like a dirty joke your mother would slap you for repeating.” The stage manager knocked lightly, then opened the door without waiting. “Sorry,” he said. “Owner wants to say hi.” Carlin didn’t stand. “Tell the owner I’m busy being human.” The manager blinked. “He’s… already coming.” Carlin looked at Alex. “This is the part where you watch people’s eyes.” A man stepped into the doorway. Nice suit. Too nice for this room. Hair perfect. Smile perfect. The kind of smile you get when you practice in a mirror. “George,” the man said warmly. “Fantastic set. Truly. You have such… range.” Carlin smiled back, but it didn’t reach anything. “Thanks,” Carlin said. “You have such… teeth.” The man chuckled politely. Not at the joke. At the social requirement. His eyes moved over Alex, Sid, Scraps. Cataloging. Not curious. Filing. Carlin felt her earlier assumption loosen. He’d thought the Enhanced were obvious. This one wasn’t delayed. This one was *trained*. The man’s gaze paused on the napkin. Carlin covered it with his hand as casually as a magician palming a coin. “Just saying hello,” the man said. “We love comedy here. We’re expanding. Thinking about bringing in new equipment. Cleaner sound. More consistency.” He glanced, not subtly, toward the booth. Carlin nodded. “Consistency is the enemy of comedy.” The man’s smile tightened by half a millimeter. “Well,” he said, still polite, “I’m sure you’ll understand. We all have to… adapt.” He left. As soon as the door shut, Scraps exhaled through his nose. “That was one,” he said. Sid rubbed his temple. “That was worse than one.” Alex’s eyes stayed on the door. “He didn’t blink right.” Carlin stood. “Okay,” he said. “Now we move.” “Move where?” Sid asked. Carlin grabbed his jacket. “Somewhere with coffee and fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look like they’re dying. A diner. We make a plan people can actually follow.” They left through a side passage that dumped them into an alley behind the venue. The city smelled like wet trash and hot electrical boxes. A taxi rolled by with a rooftop sign that flickered between “TAXI” and a scrolling ad that read **TRY NEW MIRAGE SOUND. FEEL THE DIFFERENCE.** Carlin stared at it as it passed. “Cute,” he muttered. “They’re already marketing it.” At the diner, they took a booth under a buzzing light. The waitress handed them menus with little glossy squares in the corner like decoration. Alex touched one and frowned. “What’s this?” “Promotions,” the waitress said. “You call a number, say the code, you get coupons. Don’t ask me. Owners love it.” Sid stared at the square like it offended physics. “They’re putting voice codes on paper now.” Carlin sipped burnt coffee and watched his team argue with a menu. “You see it?” he said quietly. Scraps looked up. “See what?” “The future,” Carlin said. “It’s arriving like a salesman. Smiling. Acting like it’s always been here.” They planned until the plates were cleared and the coffee turned from hot to bitter to cold. They didn’t plan heroics. They planned logistics. A circuit of safe rooms and mail drops. A list of venues that still used honest equipment. Tapes duplicated in basements. Paper flyers. Word of mouth. Jokes passed hand to hand. The work of building a resistance out of something the world still thought was entertainment. At some point, Sid said, “If we’re right, then the Enhancement isn’t perfect.” Carlin nodded. “If we’re right,” Carlin said, “then the Entity made one mistake.” Alex leaned in. “What mistake?” Carlin smiled, just a little. “It tried to harvest consciousness,” he said, “from a species that laughs at its own funerals.” Scraps snorted. Alex’s mouth twitched into something like hope. Carlin looked out the diner window at New York waking up. Neon signs dying as the sun rose. People going to work like nothing was happening. Like the culture wasn’t being rewritten one commercial at a time. He felt tired. He felt angry. He felt, for the first time in a long time, useful. “Get me a list of comics,” he said. “The ones who still tell the truth even when it costs them.” Sid frowned. “You think they’ll listen?” Carlin stood, dropped cash on the table, and put his jacket on. “They don’t have to listen,” he said. “They just have to laugh.” And as they left, Carlin made himself a promise that sounded like a joke until you said it out loud: He would turn comedy into a survival skill. Whether the world deserved it or not. ---
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Chapter 6: Compression Artifacts
<a id="chapter-06"></a> # Chapter 6: Compression Artifacts *1990* The scanner made a noise like it hated being alive. Sidney Kidd had liberated it from a closing Kinko’s on 3rd Avenue along with two boxes of thermal paper, a jar of toner that smelled like burnt pennies, and a laminated sign that said **PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE MACHINE**. The sign was accurate. Sloss Furnaces was hot even when the ovens were cold. Brick held heat. Iron held grudges. The whole place felt like the inside of a throat: damp, echoing, angry it had ever been asked to speak. Sid’s “workshop” was a hollowed-out side room off an old maintenance corridor, lit by a strip of flickering pink neon he’d salvaged from a dead arcade cabinet. Everything in the room looked like 1987 had happened and refused to leave. - A beige Macintosh II with a CRT monitor that glowed sickly green. - A stack of oscilloscopes, all knobs and switches, all analog honesty. - A dot-matrix printer that screamed every time it did its job. - A milk crate of Polaroids. - A soldering station that should’ve been retired in disgrace years ago. - And, wedged into the Mac’s backplane like a stolen tooth: a prototype DSP board labeled **MIRAGE** in slick chrome lettering, way too clean for the rest of the junk. The MIRAGE board was new. The board didn’t *feel* like it belonged in 1990, or in a furnace, or anywhere near Sid Kidd’s life. It had shown up through one of E-Z’s “you don’t ask, you don’t die” channels, wrapped in bubble foam and a fake invoice that called it “Audio Enhancement Hardware.” Sid didn’t care what it was called. It let him do math faster. That was all he needed. He hadn’t slept in fifty-three hours when he discovered that compression could reveal the Enhanced. It wasn’t a revelation. It was an accident. ## The mistake He was digitizing Alex’s surveillance Polaroids: corporate mixers, coffee shops, city council fundraisers, the kind of places where people smiled too hard and pretended that fluorescent lighting didn’t make everyone look dead. He fed one Polaroid into the scanner. The machine clanked. The Mac blinked. A progress bar crawled across the screen with the confidence of a dying slug. Sid’s hand shook as he adjusted settings with the mouse. He meant to store the scans as uncompressed bitmaps. He meant to keep them clean. He meant to do everything right. Instead, he clicked the wrong option. A prototype DCT compressor he’d been testing (because of course he’d been testing it) snapped the image into chunky blocks, the way early digital always did: like reality had been rebuilt from Lego by someone who hated edges. Sid stared at the ruined picture and felt his brain try to slide into denial. Then he saw the face. Not “distorted.” Not “artifacted.” Revealed. The subject was a Vril middle manager Alex suspected from a downtown café. In the original Polaroid, she was just a man: carefully neutral smile, mild haircut, eyes too calm. In the compressed version, the face had seams. Hard boundaries where skin should have been a gradient. Not the whole image, just her. The background was normal blocky noise. The man’s face was… assembled. Sid leaned closer to the CRT. The pixels buzzed in his vision. He toggled compression strength up and down, like he was tuning an old radio. At a certain threshold, the man’s features did something impossible: they stabilized. Like the algorithm was choosing the “most likely” version of him and couldn’t agree. Sid’s throat went dry. He tried to laugh. It came out as air. “Okay,” he whispered to nobody. “Okay. That’s… that’s not good.” He scanned the next Polaroid. A Birmingham city councilwoman who’d recently started saying the word “Enhancement” like it was a church blessing. In the original, her smile was political: wide, practiced, full of teeth that didn’t mean anything. In compression, her smile became a wound. Her eyes didn’t reflect the café lights. They reflected nothing. Flat voids. The kind of darkness you get in a camera lens when you realize you’re the one being watched. Sid’s hands went cold. He fed in the third Polaroid and watched the Mac swallow it. Helena Vasquez. A corporate event. Bright stage lights. Champagne. Smiles that looked stapled on. In the compressed image Helena wasn’t one person. She was multiple. Overlapping exposures, slightly offset, like her consciousness was out of phase with her body. Several Helenas stacked in the same outline, and one of them—just one—looked sharper than the others. More solid. More real. Like part of her was refusing to smear. Sid stood up too fast and his vision went white at the edges. He called for Alex before she could talk herself out of it. “Alex,” he shouted, voice cracking from sleep deprivation and whatever else was cracking in him. “Alex. Get down here. Bring everyone. And bring a stomach.” ## The gathering They arrived in under an hour, which meant Alex had run most of the way. She came in first, hair damp with sweat, eyes bright in the way they got when she’d seen something she didn’t want to explain. Scraps squeezed through the doorway behind her, shoulders hunched like the room might try to bite. Diminuto followed, too calm, like he’d always known this was how the decade would go. E-Z arrived last, because E-Z was always last: never first through a door, never the first to bleed. E-Z set a briefcase on Sid’s workbench. The case clicked open with a mechanism that wasn’t a latch. It was a hand-scan. A strip of green light rolled across E-Z’s palm and chirped softly, like a toy from the future pretending to be polite. The case opened. Scraps stared. “That’s… that’s not a lock.” E-Z smiled without showing teeth. “It’s a lock. It’s just from the part of the world that doesn’t make catalogs.” Sid barely noticed. He pointed at the CRT. “Look.” Alex leaned in. The flicker of the screen lit her face in pale bands. She didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then: “That’s Helena.” Sid nodded. “That’s Helena. But it’s not just her.” Diminuto stepped closer, hands clasped behind his back like a professor inspecting a student project. He studied the compressed faces with a focus that made Sid feel briefly seen and briefly terrified. Scraps was already asking the practical questions. “So this is a detector. Like… we can point this at a crowd and pick out the freaks.” E-Z’s eyes narrowed. “If it works.” “It works,” Sid said too quickly. He forced himself to breathe. “Or it’s a hallucination from sleep deprivation and microwave radiation. Either way, it’s worth checking.” Alex tapped the edge of the screen with one knuckle, gentle, like she didn’t want to startle whatever was inside it. “Explain it.” Sid tried to start with the math. His mouth tripped. He stopped, took a breath, and forced himself into human language. “Digital pictures lie,” he said. “Not because they’re evil. Because they’re… efficient. Compression throws away information your brain doesn’t ‘need’ to recognize a scene. High-frequency detail. Subtle color transitions. Stuff you don’t consciously notice.” E-Z leaned on the workbench. “And the Enhanced?” “They’re hiding in what we throw away,” Sid said. “Or… they’re using it to smooth themselves. Like makeup made of frequencies.” Scraps snorted. “So your computer is… wiping their disguise off because it thinks it’s saving disk space.” “Yes,” Sid said. “And I hate that this is how we win.” Diminuto’s voice was quiet. “Not win. See.” Sid clicked through the images again. Each one told the same story. Ordinary humans turned into blocky noise. Enhanced faces turned into seams, voids, overlays. Alex’s eyes tracked details Sid hadn’t even realized were there. She was too good at seeing things in the wrong light. She looked like a woman watching a magic trick and hating the magician for existing. “How reliable?” E-Z asked. Sid flipped open his notebook. Pages of equations and coffee stains. Numbers that looked like they’d been written by someone who couldn’t remember how sleep worked. “Preliminary,” he said, “seventy-ish percent. Seventy-three if I don’t count the borderline cases.” E-Z exhaled slowly. “Seventy-three percent accuracy is a business plan.” “It’s also a liability,” Alex said. “We accuse the wrong person, we burn trust.” Scraps jabbed a thumb toward the furnace walls. “We’re already living in a burnt-out trust fund.” Sid felt his tongue try to turn the word “trust” into something else. He swallowed hard. Diminuto spoke like he’d been waiting for permission. “This is not new.” Scraps blinked. “Excuse me?” “My grandmother,” Diminuto said. “Carpathians. She taught me a folk method for identifying… impostors. You look through distortion. Water. Smoke. Cracked glass. Anything that breaks the image. Pure sight can be deceived. Broken sight reveals seams.” Sid stared. “That sounds like superstition.” “All superstition is data,” Diminuto replied, calm as stone. “Poorly documented. Inadequately controlled. Still data.” E-Z lifted one of Sid’s Polaroids, careful not to smudge it. “If Vril are hiding in discarded frequencies, they’re not the only ones using compression.” Sid’s eyes flicked to the MIRAGE board. The chrome letters caught the pink neon light and looked wet. “No,” Sid said. “They’re not.” ## Rivets speaks The Rivets Box crackled to life like it had been listening the whole time, which it had. That was the worst part about it. “HAVE BEEN OBSERVING,” Rivets said, voice clearer than usual, the syllables less smeared. “COMPRESSION PHENOMENON IS KNOWN TO VRIL.” Alex went still. “They know.” “YES.” Scraps muttered, “Of course they do.” “VRIL HAVE INFLUENCED CODEC DEVELOPMENT SINCE 1986,” Rivets continued. “JPEG COMMITTEE. H.261 VIDEO STANDARD. EARLY MPEG WORK. SAME CONSULTING FIRMS. SAME ADVISORS. SAME MONEY.” E-Z’s gaze sharpened. “Names?” The CRT flickered. A list scrolled across the screen in pale text, like a terminal from an old war movie. Sid recognized a few. Consultants who’d never existed before PROMETHEUS. Companies with empty addresses and too much funding. Technical committees stacked with “experts” nobody could place. Scraps leaned closer. “These people are everywhere.” “They’re not trying to stop compression,” Sid said, the idea forming in his skull with a nasty certainty. “They can’t. They need it. Compression is how the world starts eating itself. But they’re shaping standards so the ‘discarded’ frequencies stay useful to them.” Diminuto nodded once. “They are managing revelation. Minimizing it. Not eliminating it.” E-Z’s voice went flat. “So your discovery is a hole in their wall.” “Yes,” Sid said. “And holes get patched.” “THERE IS MORE,” Rivets said. Another list replaced the first. Names. Dates. Institutions. Alex read them aloud, and each name felt like a door closing. “Sarah Chen. MIT. 1987. Paper on facial recognition anomalies in compressed imagery. Disappeared.” “Michael Roberts. Stanford. 1988. Documented impossible color values in heavily compressed photos of executives. Ruled suicide.” “Jennifer Wu. Independent. 1989. Built an algorithm for ‘unnatural compression patterns.’ Car accident.” The list went on. Seventeen names. Seventeen quiet disappearances. Seventeen “accidents” that all smelled like the same hand. Scraps’ jaw tightened. “So we’re late.” E-Z’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. “We’re early enough to die for it.” Sid felt a sharp, stupid urge to laugh and couldn’t tell if it was fear or a defense mechanism. He settled for breathing. Alex’s voice came out low. “We keep this tight.” E-Z snapped, “No. We move it.” Diminuto raised a finger, patient even now. “If you distribute it widely, you give Vril a clean target list. They will patch the hole and wipe the witnesses.” E-Z leaned forward. “If we keep it tight, we get wiped anyway, just smaller.” Scraps cut in, blunt. “Both of you shut up. Sid, can this help at RCL?” Sid blinked. “What?” Scraps pointed at the Polaroids. “You got a way to see what’s fake under the shine. That means we can screen builders. Fighters. Sponsors. Anyone who tries to get close.” Alex’s eyes sharpened. The idea clicked into place. “It becomes a field tool.” E-Z’s smile returned, thin and sharp. “Now you’re thinking in supply chains.” Sid swallowed. The substitutions pressed behind his teeth, eager as a parasite. “Give me six hours,” Sid said, and hated that he was bargaining with time like it was a vendor. “Let me test more samples. Different ratios. Different subjects. Different lighting. If it holds, we can build a protocol.” “We don’t have six hours,” E-Z said, and tapped the briefcase. “We have a clock.” He pulled out a pager. Not a normal pager. Normal pagers were gray bricks that beeped like dying birds. This one had a tiny strip display that scrolled text smoothly. Predictive, almost. Like it knew what message was coming before it arrived. It buzzed once. E-Z glanced at it, and the color drained from his face in a way Sid had never seen. “We’ve got eyes,” E-Z said. Alex’s head snapped up. “Here?” E-Z nodded. “Close enough.” Scraps’ hand went to his belt out of habit, like he expected a wrench to save him from gods. Sid’s heart started hammering. Diminuto turned to the CRT, calm as ever. “Then we finish quickly.” ## The deep dive They worked like people who knew the building could catch fire at any second. Sid ran the Polaroids through compression at different thresholds, logging results in a spiral notebook because notebooks didn’t get hacked. Alex watched for patterns in the seams, eyes going glassy when she stared too long, like she could feel the wrongness trying to look back. Scraps pulled technical docs on compression committees and scribbled names on a whiteboard, linking them with arrows like a conspiracy detective who wasn’t wrong. E-Z photographed the CRT with a Polaroid, then photographed the Polaroid with another Polaroid, building analog redundancy like he was stacking sandbags against a flood. At hour two, Sid found progression. He pulled up two images of the same suspected Enhanced operative taken months apart. “Look,” he said, voice tight. Early. Subtle seams, almost like someone had outlined the face with a chrome pencil. Later. The face barely held together. Overlaps. Tears. A smear that made Sid’s stomach clench. “The more Enhanced they get,” Sid said, “the more the disguise fails under compression.” Alex stared. “So we can track integration.” “Yes,” Sid said. “We can quantify it.” Diminuto exhaled softly. “Degradation is measurable.” Scraps’ voice was rough. “That means they’re not becoming better. They’re becoming less… compatible.” Sid nodded. “And that’s a weakness.” At hour four, Sid found the thing that made the room go silent. He ran an image that wasn’t an Enhanced face. It was a street shot. A normal person. A normal background. Taken near a location Alex had marked as “high Vril activity.” Compression snapped the photo into blocks. And in the empty spaces, where nothing should be, something appeared. Geometry. Not shapes, not exactly. Suggestions of forms that didn’t belong in a two-dimensional image. Lines that implied edges that implied corners that implied depth that implied… too much. Sid’s eyes watered. His brain tried to reject it the way it rejected optical illusions that broke physics. Scraps whispered, “No.” Alex leaned closer and immediately flinched back. “Don’t stare at it,” she said, voice sharp. “Don’t.” E-Z’s Polaroid camera clicked three times in rapid succession. Diminuto swayed slightly, hand bracing on the workbench. “That is… infrastructure,” he said, as if naming it made it less poisonous. “A scaffold.” Sid’s mouth went dry. “It’s like… the background is contaminated. Like their system bleeds through in places where their signal is strong.” Alex nodded slowly, face pale in the CRT glow. “We’re not just looking at them anymore.” Scraps swallowed. “We’re looking at the cage.” The MIRAGE board’s status light flickered. It had been a steady teal for hours. Now it pulsed red. Sid froze. “What does that mean?” he whispered. E-Z’s pager buzzed again. This time it didn’t just buzz. It *chirped*, soft and almost friendly, like the device was proud of itself. E-Z read the scroll, then looked up. “They’re probing,” E-Z said. Alex’s voice went flat. “They know we’re doing something.” “Or something knows,” Diminuto corrected gently. Scraps took a step toward the power strip. “We shut it down.” Sid’s hands hovered over the keyboard. A part of him screamed to save, to copy, to print, to preserve. Another part screamed to pull the plug and run. E-Z slammed a Polaroid on the table. “If we lose this, we lose the only clean way to identify them without staring into their eyes.” Alex’s eyes flicked to the furnace wall like she was measuring distance. “We don’t lose it.” Diminuto nodded once. “Redundancy.” Sid’s pulse thudded in his throat. “Okay. Okay. Okay.” He started printing. The dot-matrix printer screamed into life, spitting out pages of blocky faces and impossible background geometry. Sid grabbed them as they came out, stacking them like he was building a paper fortress. Scraps tore a sheet off the printer output and stared at it like it might crawl. “Jesus,” Scraps muttered. “This is… this is a map.” E-Z snapped, “It’s evidence.” Alex said, “It’s both.” ## The argument They were still printing when E-Z pushed again. “We need distribution,” E-Z insisted. “Not everybody. Not a broadcast. But cells. Key people. RCL contacts. The ones who can move.” Diminuto shook his head. “You are thinking like an entrepreneur. Vril think like an ecosystem. The moment the pattern goes wide, they alter the environment.” Scraps jabbed a finger at Diminuto. “And if we keep it here, Helena shows up and drags us into a van. Which environment is better?” Diminuto didn’t flinch. “Neither. You choose the one you can survive.” Alex looked at Sid. “How fast can they patch this?” Sid swallowed. “If they’ve been shaping standards since ’86, they can adjust algorithms. But not completely. Compression has constraints. If they ‘fix’ it too much, the files get bigger, the systems slow down. People notice.” E-Z smiled thinly. “So we stay inside what humans will tolerate.” Scraps snorted. “Humans tolerate anything if you sell it as convenience.” A distant sound echoed through the furnace corridors. Not footsteps. Not metal settling. A laugh track. Soft. Faint. Like a television left on somewhere it shouldn’t be. Sid’s skin prickled. Alex’s eyes widened. “Did you hear that?” E-Z’s face went hard. “We’re done. Now.” Sid’s tongue tried to say “done” and nearly said “purple.” He bit down so hard his jaw ached. “We split it,” Sid said, forcing words into place. “Three copies. One stays here. One goes with E-Z. One goes with Alex.” Scraps grabbed the stack of printouts. “Make it four.” He walked to the furnace wall where a loose brick had always bugged Sid. Scraps pried it out like it was nothing and slid a bundle of printouts into the hollow behind it. “Fireproof,” Scraps said. “And if somebody finds it, it looks like garbage. Which is perfect.” E-Z was already repacking his briefcase with Polaroids, printouts, and a diskette Sid had labeled in Sharpie: **DO NOT PUT IN A NORMAL COMPUTER, YOU MORON**. Diminuto took a copy too, but his was different: he copied key pages by hand, rewriting the math in pencil. Slow. Painful. Stubborn. “Analog,” Diminuto murmured. “Always.” Alex placed one Polaroid in her jacket pocket like it was a saint’s relic. Then the MIRAGE light went steady red. A low hum crept through the room, so low Sid felt it in his teeth. The CRT shimmered. For a fraction of a second, Helena’s compressed image appeared on the screen without Sid calling it up. Just her. Overlapping. Smeared. And the solid version of her turned its head, directly toward the camera. Directly toward Sid. Sid’s blood went cold. Then the screen snapped back to the last file like nothing had happened. Scraps stared at the monitor. “Tell me you saw that.” Alex’s voice came out hoarse. “We saw it.” E-Z closed the briefcase with a soft click. The hand-scan light rolled across her palm again, green and cheerful, like it had never betrayed anyone in its life. “We move,” E-Z said. “Now.” ## The price They left in staggered exits, the way paranoid people leave a building when they know they’ve been noticed. Scraps went first with a bag of tools like a man who’d never been to prison but had always planned for it. E-Z went second, slipping into the corridor shadows like he was born in them. Diminuto paused in the doorway, watching Sid with an expression Sid couldn’t read. “You’re pushing the substitutions,” Diminuto said. Sid tried to smile. It felt like moving a rusted hinge. “I’m fine.” Diminuto’s eyes softened, and that made it worse. “You are not fine. You are useful. Those are different states.” Sid huffed a laugh that came out bitter. “I’ll put that on a motivational poster.” Diminuto stepped closer, lowering his voice. “If the mathematics eat your language, write while you can. Not later. Not when you are ‘done.’ Now.” Sid nodded, because he couldn’t trust his mouth. Diminuto hesitated, then said quietly, “My grandmother called it becoming *przejrzysta*. See-through. When the world starts looking through you instead.” Sid swallowed. “Comforting.” “It is not meant to be,” Diminuto said, then left. Alex stayed behind just long enough to look Sid in the eye. “You did good,” Alex said. She didn’t say it like praise. She said it like a warning. “Now we pay for it.” Sid’s hands trembled. “How long do you think we have?” Alex’s gaze flicked to the CRT, to the red status light, to the furnace corridor where the laugh track had come from. “Less than you want,” Alex said. Then she was gone too. Sid was alone in the neon-lit junk room with a scanner that hated him and a computer that glowed like it was harboring a secret. He sat back down, hands hovering over his notebook. He started writing everything. The thresholds. The ratios. The seams. The way Helena’s solid version looked at him through a compressed photograph like the photo was a window. He wrote until his wrist cramped. He wrote until words tried to turn into nonsense and he forced them back into place. The substitution pressure built behind his teeth like a storm. He caught one. Then another. Then another. At some point he realized he was counting them the way you count heartbeats when you think your heart might stop. Outside the workshop, somewhere deep in Sloss, a television laughed softly to itself. Sid didn’t go looking. He stayed in the pink neon light, surrounded by printed faces and impossible geometry, and wrote like a man trying to outrun his own mind. Six months, he thought. Maybe less. But maybe enough. ---
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* * *
CHAPTER 7: The Consumer Trap
<a id="chapter-07"></a> # CHAPTER 7: The Consumer Trap *1991* January in Birmingham did that thing where cold pretended it was rain and rain pretended it was a philosophy. The air clung to your clothes like it had opinions about you. Everything smelled like wet concrete, gasoline, and somebody’s heated argument about “the new economy.” Alex Hartwell pushed a shopping cart that didn’t need pushing. The front wheels were smart now. The cart tracked in a straight line on its own, like it had a tiny conscience and better posture than most of the customers. A thick coiled cord ran from the handle to a waist-high kiosk at the entrance, where an employee with a neon-pink vest scanned membership cards and pretended the kiosk wasn’t also scanning faces. The kiosk’s screen was a CRT. Of course it was. Green text, chunky pixels, a little hiss at the edges. It looked like 1983. The camera mounted above it did not look like 1983. Alex tried not to stare. Staring was how you got remembered. She wasn’t here to buy groceries. She was here to see if the groceries were buying *her*. Inside, the store was bright in the way only fluorescent lights could be: clean, harsh, and oddly intimate. The kind of brightness that made you feel like your thoughts were visible. Above the aisles, speakers played “light rock” with an audio sheen that felt… too crisp. Not loud. Not obvious. Just clean enough to sand off the rough edges of a human brain. Sid called it “polish.” Static called it “a lullaby for cattle.” Alex called it **practice**. People moved with the slow certainty of shoppers who believed the world was stable. They lingered. They compared labels. They stared at endcaps like they were deciding between two equally meaningful futures. A man in a V-neck sweater laughed at a cereal display. Not chuckled. Not smiled. **Laughed.** It started on cue and ended too cleanly, like the laugh was a button he’d pressed and released. His eyes stayed flat the entire time. Alex watched her mouth, not her eyes. The smile was right. The sound was right. The timing was wrong. She drifted past him as if she was just another woman with a list and mild resentment. She let her gaze slide over the cereal boxes, the neon colors, the mascots with their too-perfect teeth. **Lucky Charms** sat on the middle shelf, facing forward like it knew it was being watched back. She didn’t touch it. Not yet. At the end of Aisle 4, a new endcap had appeared like a stage set assembled overnight. A banner in hot magenta screamed: **NEW!** Below it, three product towers rose like shrines. **CHIPPZ** **SYNC** **NEURAL-WHITE** The packaging was pure late-80s: chrome gradients, neon squiggles, blocky fonts, little “laser” accents. It looked like a Saturday morning commercial that had gotten bored and decided to become a religion. Alex stepped closer, pretending interest. **CHIPPZ** were “stackable protein crisps,” marketed as “the snack for the modern mind.” The bag showed a cartoon brain wearing sunglasses. **SYNC** was a “sports drink” shaped like a battery, with a fake gauge printed on the side. It promised “electrolytes, focus, and flow.” **NEURAL-WHITE** toothpaste promised “cleaner, brighter, smarter,” and the smiling model on the box looked like someone had taken a normal person and edited out all the doubt. Alex picked up a CHIPPZ bag with two fingers like it might be hot. Her fingertips tingled. Not pain. Not shock. A faint vibration, like holding a cheap electric razor that was switched off but still wanted to live. She set it back down. An employee turned the corner. Young guy. Name tag. Hair sprayed into a shape that required faith. “Need help finding something?” he asked, too cheerful. Alex put on the smile women learned to wear when a stranger’s proximity was a tax. “No,” she said. “Just trying to decide how much I hate myself today.” He laughed reflexively. The laugh did not reach his eyes. It lasted about eight seconds. Then it stopped, like a metronome. He moved on. Alex waited until she was three aisles away, then slid one of each product into her cart. Evidence. Samples. Problems. The cart beeped softly. A tiny red light on the handle blinked once. “Cute,” she muttered. “My groceries have opinions now.” She headed toward the back, where the pharmacy aisle lived, and where the store’s security cameras thickened like mold. Everywhere she looked, she saw the new background tech creeping in, wearing old clothes. There were “smart” price tags with tiny LCD strips clipped beneath the paper ones. There were kiosks advertising “instant photo processing” that could print a picture in under a minute, and they had the friendly beige plastic of a VCR but the speed of something that didn’t belong in 1991. A mother paid for diapers by pressing her thumb to a pad. The pad was housed in a chunky gray box with a sticker that said **FUTUREPAY: NO CASH, NO PROBLEM** in neon teal. The cashier didn’t even blink. Nobody blinked. That was the part that made Alex’s skin crawl. They were being moved forward in time like furniture, and they were grateful someone carried them. At the back of the store, near the employee-only door, Alex found what she came for. A promotional stand for a “Green Tomorrow” campaign. A smiling cartoon earth wearing a headband. A slogan in clean white letters: **CLEAN EARTH. CLEAN YOU.** The poster was printed on glossy paper that felt wrong to the touch, like it had too many layers. A stack of pamphlets promised community recycling drives, “micro-waste reduction,” and “new filtration initiatives.” The language was cheerful and aggressively reasonable. Alex grabbed one. She didn’t believe in coincidences anymore, and Vril was nothing if not aggressively reasonable. She pushed her cart toward the checkout, careful not to look directly into any camera lens too long. At the register, the cashier scanned her items. The scanner chirped. The CRT display flickered. A little box popped up next to her total: **SUGGESTED ADD-ON: SYNC (BUY 2, SAVE $1)** Alex hadn’t given them her name. Alex hadn’t used a card. Alex hadn’t said anything. She watched the cashier’s face. Nothing. Automatic. Like the suggestion box was a normal part of reality. Alex paid cash. The cashier looked mildly annoyed, like cash was a weird hobby. Outside, the rain had decided to become mist. Alex loaded the bag into her car and sat behind the wheel without starting it. She held the CHIPPZ bag in her lap and stared at it. The tingling was stronger now, like the packaging didn’t like being alone with her. She took a breath, reached into her purse, and pulled out a small cassette recorder. Analog. Reliable. Stupidly heavy. Perfect. She clicked it on and spoke softly. “January. Birmingham. New products. CHIPPZ. SYNC. Neural-White. Packaging hums. Suggestion prompts at register. Green Tomorrow campaign running in-store.” She paused, then added, because honesty mattered now: “And I hate that I can feel it.” She clicked the recorder off. Then she started the car and drove to Sid’s shop. --- Sid Kidd’s shop always smelled like solder, ozone, and the stubborn hope that broken things could be made whole if you were willing to swear at them long enough. The sign in the front window still read **KIDD REPAIR & ELECTRONICS** in fading paint. Inside, the place was a museum of dead technology and half-alive miracles. CRTs stacked like tombstones. Radios cracked open like frogs in biology class. A Polaroid of Scraps taped to the wall with the word **DON’T** written under it in red marker. Sid was at his bench, hunched over a circuit board, the magnifying visor on his head making him look like a man preparing to perform surgery on a toaster. Alex dropped the grocery bag on the counter. Sid flinched. “Jesus,” he said. “You can’t just slam things like that. Some of this equipment is older than you.” Alex reached into the bag and placed the CHIPPZ, SYNC, and NEURAL-WHITE in a neat row. Sid stared at them like they were three small sins. “Tell me you didn’t eat them,” he said. “I didn’t eat them,” Alex replied. “I brought them to you so you could do science crimes.” Sid’s mouth twitched. The closest he came to a smile these days. He picked up the SYNC bottle, turned it slowly, and ran his thumb over the printed “battery gauge.” “This is…,” he began. “Too cute?” Alex offered. “Too *new*,” Sid said. He held it near his bench lamp. The plastic caught the light wrong, like it had a faint internal shimmer. “Where’d you get these?” “Grocery store,” Alex said. “Endcap shrine. Suggested add-ons at the register.” Sid set the bottle down and looked at her hard. “Suggested add-ons,” he repeated, like tasting the words. “They know what you want before you want it,” Alex said. “And everyone acts like it’s normal.” Sid swore under his breath. He reached for a small handheld device that looked like a chunky calculator with wires coming out of it. Alex recognized it. Something she’d built from old parts and newer parts she wouldn’t explain. “Don’t touch anything metal,” Sid said. “I’m not a toddler,” Alex said, and immediately touched something metal. Sid made a sound of pure disappointment. He clipped a lead to the CHIPPZ bag and another to the SYNC bottle. The device’s display flickered between numbers and symbols that meant nothing to Alex but everything to Sid. His jaw tightened. “What?” Alex asked. Sid’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. “It’s… modulated,” he said. “The packaging. The plastic. It’s like… like they’re printing the damn *signal* into the polymer.” Alex felt her stomach drop. “That’s not possible,” she said, because sometimes you needed to say it out loud to keep your brain from sprinting into panic. Sid laughed. It was real. Short. Bitter. “Not possible,” he echoed. “In a world where a TV laugh track can keep you alive for twelve seconds.” Alex didn’t laugh back. Sid moved to the toothpaste box. He peeled back the top flap and slipped a small probe inside without touching the paste. His device beeped. Sid froze. “Sid?” Alex said, softer now. He swallowed. “It’s not just… frequency,” he said. “There’s particulate. Fine. Embedded. I can see it in the reflectance.” He reached for a microscope, old as sin, with a newer camera bolted to it like a parasite. The camera fed into a small CRT monitor on his bench. The image bloomed in green. Sid scraped the inside of the toothpaste box flap with a razor blade, collected a dusting of powder, and slid it onto a glass plate. He leaned in. Alex leaned in beside her. On the CRT, the powder looked like glittering sand. Then Sid adjusted the focus. The glitter became… fragments. Tiny, jagged flecks. Irregular. Synthetic. Alex’s throat went dry. “Microplastics,” she whispered. Sid’s hands shook. “They’re putting it *back*,” he said, and his voice cracked on the last word like he hated the idea and loved it at the same time. Alex stared at the flecks. Microplastics were supposed to be a problem. A pollutant. A shame. Sid stared at the flecks like they were a shield. “Say it,” Alex demanded. “Say what you’re thinking.” Sid opened his mouth. Then his eyes flicked unfocused for half a second, like a word had stepped in front of his thoughts. “Purple,” he said. He blinked hard, angry at himself. Alex felt a chill crawl up her spine. Sid slammed his palm down on the bench. “No,” he snapped, and the word came out like a bark. “No. Not that. Not now.” He took a breath. Forced his brain back into place. “They’re cleaning us,” Sid said, slower, careful with each syllable like he was defusing a bomb. “They’re doing all these ‘green initiatives’ and ‘filters’ and ‘clean living’ campaigns.” Alex nodded. “And microplastics,” Sid continued, “from the sixties, seventies, eighties… all that nasty, accidental pollution? It’s been *interfering*.” He looked at her. “It’s been scrambling their integration. Like static in the signal.” Alex’s skin prickled. “You’re saying pollution is… armor,” she said. “I’m saying,” Sid replied, “they’re cleaning us to eat us.” Silence hung between them. The shop’s old ceiling fan turned slowly, squeaking like it was eavesdropping. From the back room, a radio played low-volume country music and somehow that made everything worse, because it meant the world was still pretending it was normal. Alex stared at the toothpaste box like it might grin. “So what do we do?” she asked. Sid’s laugh returned, softer, exhausted. “We do what we always do,” he said. “We cheat.” The door jingled. Scraps walked in, dripping rain, hair stuck to his forehead, carrying a milk crate full of junk like it was treasure. He stopped when he saw the products lined up on the counter. “What’s that?” he asked. “Snacks,” Alex said. “Evil snacks.” Scraps leaned in, read the labels, and frowned. “CHIPPZ?” he said. “That sounds like a robot’s friend.” Sid snorted. “Or a robot’s leash,” Alex said. Scraps set the crate down and wiped her hands on her jeans. “You look like you just found out the government’s been putting something in the water,” he said. Sid pointed at the toothpaste. “They are,” he said. “Sort of.” Scraps stared, then shrugged like that was normal. “Figures,” he said. “So we’re gonna put something back?” Alex watched her carefully. Scraps always jumped ahead to the practical. Sid hesitated. Then he nodded. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” Sid said, “but yes.” Scraps grinned. “Finally,” he said. “A plan that sounds like it belongs in this universe.” --- They met that night in the back of the shop, under the flicker of a broken neon sign that Sid refused to fix because it made the room feel like a confession booth. E-Z arrived after midnight, as usual. No announcement. No headlights. Just a shadow at the door and a voice like a smirk. “You called,” E-Z said, stepping into the light. They wore a leather jacket that looked like it had survived three different decades and still hated all of them. Alex didn’t like E-Z. Which was how she knew they were useful. Sid slid the microscope plate across the bench. E-Z leaned in. Their expression didn’t change, but their eyes sharpened. “Microplastics,” E-Z said. Sid nodded. “Accidental interference,” Alex added. “Protection, in a disgusting way.” E-Z’s mouth twitched. “Humanity,” they said, “saved by its own trash. Poetic.” Scraps folded his arms. “So we make trash,” he said, like it was the obvious next step. Sid bristled. “We don’t make *trash*,” Sid snapped. “We make… counter-products.” E-Z picked up the SYNC bottle, turned it, and tapped the fake gauge with a fingernail. “You’re thinking bootleg,” E-Z said. “We’re thinking *shield*,” Alex corrected. E-Z looked at her. “Same thing,” they said. Alex’s jaw tightened. “I don’t want to poison people,” she said. E-Z shrugged. “They’re already being poisoned,” E-Z replied. “Just with something worse.” Sid stared at the microscope plate like it might absolve him. “We can’t compete with the rollout,” he said. “They’ve got distribution. Shelf space. Ads. They’ll be in every store before we can solder a damn resistor.” E-Z nodded slowly. “I can,” they said. Scraps snorted. “You can’t make a toothpaste factory,” he said. E-Z looked at him like Scraps was adorable in a slightly feral way. “I don’t need a factory,” E-Z said. “I need a supply chain and a lie.” They leaned forward, resting their hands on the bench. “We fund bootleg protective products,” E-Z said. “Not in the stores. Not on the shelves. Under the counter. Back rooms. Swap meets. Church bazaars. Anywhere people buy things that fall off trucks.” Alex stared. “You want to sell… microplastic toothpaste?” she asked, like her mouth was trying to refuse the sentence. E-Z smiled. “Not just microplastics,” they said. “We layer the interference.” Sid’s eyes lifted. “Lucky Charms patterns,” he said quietly. E-Z’s smile widened, just a fraction. “The cereal geometry,” they said. “The frequency play. The silly little shapes.” Scraps made a face. “We’re gonna save the world with breakfast and trash,” he said. E-Z spread their hands. “We poison them to save them,” E-Z said. “Not ideal. But better than harvested.” Alex felt her stomach twist. “What about consent?” she demanded. “What about telling people what they’re doing?” E-Z’s gaze didn’t move. “If you tell them,” E-Z said, “half of them won’t believe you. A quarter will laugh at you. And the remaining quarter will get themselves killed trying to be heroes.” Sid flinched, like E-Z had hit a nerve. E-Z softened, just slightly. A flicker of humanity under the cynicism. “You want consent,” E-Z said. “You want truth. I respect that.” They tapped the SYNC bottle again. “But the enemy is selling compliance in neon packaging. We sell interference in neon packaging. Same mall. Different god.” Alex looked at Sid. Sid looked at Scraps. Scraps looked at the products like he was already picturing where to hide them inside armor plating and toolboxes. Alex exhaled. “Fine,” she said. “But we do it with guardrails.” E-Z arched a brow. “Guardrails,” they repeated, amused. “Warnings,” Alex clarified. “As much as we can. We distribute through people we trust. We don’t flood the city.” E-Z nodded. “Controlled distribution,” they said. “Good. That makes it harder to trace.” Sid reached for a pencil and started sketching on a scrap of paper, hands moving fast like his brain had finally found a direction that wasn’t terror. “Geometry patterns,” he muttered. “Carrier modulation. Packaging. Labels. We can print it. I can do it.” Scraps leaned over his shoulder. “Can we put it in something cooler than toothpaste?” he asked. “Like gum?” Sid glared. “I’m not making microplastic gum,” he snapped. Scraps grinned. “Coward,” he said. E-Z chuckled, low. Alex watched them all and felt the strange, grim relief of a plan forming. Outside, the city buzzed with neon signs and late-night traffic and a future that was arriving too fast in a costume it didn’t deserve. Inside, they decided to fight back with trash, breakfast cereal math, and the stubborn refusal to be quietly eaten. Alex clicked her cassette recorder on. “Operation,” she said, then paused. Sid looked up. “What?” he asked. Alex smiled, small and sharp. “Operation: Grocery Store War,” she said. E-Z snorted. “Catchy,” they said. Alex clicked the recorder off. Then she looked at the CHIPPZ bag again. For the first time, the faint vibration in her fingertips didn’t feel like fear. It felt like a target. ---
* * *
Chapter 8: The Robot Salvage King
<a id="chapter-08"></a> # Chapter 8: The Robot Salvage King *1991* Atlanta always felt like Birmingham’s big cousin who went to college and wouldn’t shut up about it. Scraps McGillicuddy rolled into town in a borrowed pickup that rattled like a coffee can full of bolts, towing a flatbed that rattled like a bigger coffee can full of bigger bolts. The radio couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be gospel or static, so it compromised and did both. Strapped down under ratchet straps and good intentions was his featherweight entry for the Robot Combat League’s first public event. He’d named it **Junk Saint** because: 1) it was made of junk, and 2) if it survived what he was about to do to it, it deserved a halo. Junk Saint was bipedal. Technically. If you squinted, it looked like a man built out of road signs, salvage actuators, and spite. One arm was slightly longer than the other, like it had grown up reading the wrong books. Its head was a welded VHS camcorder housing, lens socketed where an eye would be if humans were made of aluminum and bad decisions. Scraps built it in three nights, two afternoons, and one long stretch where he forgot meals existed. Rivets needed a body one day. Not yet. Not even close. But you didn’t build a future vessel in a straight line. You built it in pieces. Scraps had a list folded in his pocket, stained with grease and coffee and whatever else life dripped on paper. It wasn’t a shopping list. It was a body plan. - high-torque hip actuators (left and right, matched) - joint encoders that could survive impact - a power core that didn’t sag under load - sensor housings with shielding that felt “too much” for civilian use - anything that looked like it belonged on a machine meant to move like it *wanted* to He didn’t know how much of that list was his own idea and how much was… influence. Sometimes he’d catch himself staring at a pile of parts and thinking, *That’s a spine. That’s a rib. That’s a shoulder socket.* Like he was building a person, not a robot. Maybe he was. You built it in places where nobody asked why you needed a high-torque hip joint rated for impacts no human body should ever absorb. You built it by stealing the empire’s fire. Right now, the empire’s fire was throwing a neon-lit robot gladiator festival at the Atlanta Expo Center and calling it *sports*. Scraps checked the straps again, not because he thought the robot would jump out, but because he had a deep, religious respect for gravity’s sense of humor. Billboards flashed so bright they felt like they were pushing light into his skull. Everything was colored the way a VHS tape remembered reality: too saturated, too soft at the edges, a little haunted. A bus rolled past with a new ad, glossy teal and magenta. **SYNC!** *Drink the future. Feel clean.* Scraps spat. “Drink the future. That’s a threat where I come from.” He turned into the Expo Center parking lot and saw trailers that looked like they’d never smelled rust. People in branded jackets unloaded sleek bipedal frames with armor panels and joint housings that looked… wrong. Not wrong as in broken. Wrong as in *too good* for 1991. Inside, the lights made their own weather. The vendor rows felt like a flea market that had been quietly replaced by a science fair for liars. A booth selling “home security” systems demoed a palm scanner that read through grime and sweat and didn’t blink once. Another had a translation headset with a wired belt pack, glowing teal, the rep loudly claiming it could turn “any language into English in real time” while he looked like he’d never left Georgia. A guy in mirrored shades showed off a portable “video phone” the size of a VCR remote, its screen a tiny LCD with a CRT-like glow filter slapped over it, because apparently even the future couldn’t let go of scanlines. People gathered, impressed, then wandered off like they’d just seen a magician pull a rabbit from a hat. That was the weirdest part. Nobody asked *how*. They just nodded and said, “Technology, man,” like that explained anything. Scraps moved through it all with his hat low, eyes open. If the world was accelerating, he needed to see where the seams were. Neon tubes lined the rafters. Laser grids traced fences over the arenas. Smoke machines breathed. A huge screen blared promo footage of robots trading blows in slow motion while a voice-over promised “THE FUTURE OF COMBAT SPORTS” with the sincerity of a man selling time shares. Music thumped from stacked speakers, but it wasn’t a band. It was a loop. A synthetic beat that kept trying to land on a downbeat and missing, like it was waiting for somebody else to tell it when to clap. Kids ran by with RCL foam fingers. A promoter shoved foil packets into hands like communion wafers. **CHIPPZ**, bubble letters, cartoonish. Scraps didn’t take one. He’d watched enough creatures get lured into traps by free things. Mostly raccoons, but the principle held. At registration, a woman with purple lipstick and a headset the size of a sandwich looked at his paperwork and blinked. “Featherweight division. Unit designation…” “Junk Saint.” She stared at him like he’d said “My baby’s name is Divorce.” She shoved a wristband at him. “Sign this waiver, you understand the League isn’t responsible for damages to property, emotional trauma, or existential revelations.” Scraps paused. “Existential what now?” She smiled with the dead-eyed joy of a person who had read the waiver so many times it stopped being language. “Standard.” He signed. They always put the truth in the fine print. --- ## The Arenas Three fight pits sat in the main hall, each surrounded by padded barriers and sponsor banners. The padding was new. The banners were newer. The sponsors were the newest thing in the room, and they all had names that sounded like they were invented by focus groups with a blood feud against vowels. **NEUROWHITE.** **SYNC.** **CHIPPZ.** **MIRAGE AUDIO SOLUTIONS.** Mirage’s booth looked like a sound studio and a confession room had a baby. Silver rack units blinked. Thick cables disappeared into cases that had no business being here. A man in a blazer smiled at passing crowds like he was hiding a knife. Scraps kept walking. Junk Saint rolled into the featherweight staging line with the other bipedal units. Some looked like sleek mannequins. Some looked like exposed skeletons. One wore a carbon-fiber chestplate stamped with a sponsor logo and moved with balance corrections so fast Scraps felt personally insulted by physics. A guy in a too-clean polo leaned over. “You bring that thing from a scrap yard?” Scraps looked him over. “You always start conversations by insulting other people’s children or is this a special occasion?” The guy laughed, then introduced himself as Chad. The name fit like a cheap suit. “You’re gonna get killed,” Chad said, nodding at Junk Saint. Scraps nodded back. “That’s kind of the plan.” Chad blinked. “The plan is to lose?” “The plan is to learn,” Scraps said. “And to take home whatever falls off other people’s robots when they’re done showing off.” Chad stared, like he didn’t know whether to laugh or report Scraps to management. A horn sounded. The bracket screen lit. **SCRAPS McGILLICUDDY / JUNK SAINT** vs **TEAM APEX / SERAPH-4** Seraph. Of course. Somebody always had to bring angels into it. --- ## Match One Seraph-4 walked into the arena like it had been born there: white armor panels over a titanium skeleton, joints capped with black housings, head a smooth dome with a single visor. It looked like a stormtrooper who got into robotics instead of fascism. Junk Saint entered like it had just fallen down a hill and decided to keep going out of spite. The announcer boomed: “FIRST MATCH OF THE NIGHT! TEAM APEX VERSUS THE JUNKYARD GENIUS, SCRAPS McGILLICUDDY!” Scraps flinched. They were already calling him something. That was either good news or a curse. He gripped his control rig: a modified flight stick, foot pedals, and wiring taped down with electrical tape that had lost its will to live. He’d refused the League’s optional “haptic feedback harness.” Not because he was brave. Because he didn’t trust anything that wanted to hug him. Across the arena, Chad stood in a semi-enclosed booth with a branded headset and a rig that looked like a NASA simulator. The bell sounded. Seraph-4 lunged with clean, efficient movement. A straight punch that would have knocked a human’s teeth into another zip code. Junk Saint took one step and… didn’t. One ankle locked for half a second. The whole body pitched forward. Scraps’ stomach tightened. Then Junk Saint did something it wasn’t supposed to do. It *collapsed*. Not a fall. Not a stumble. A deliberate drop, knees folding, torso dipping, arms tucking in like a boxer ducking under a swing. Seraph-4’s punch cut air. Momentum carried it forward. Its foot caught on Junk Saint’s bent leg. Seraph-4 went down hard. The crowd roared. Scraps stared at his controls like they’d betrayed him into success. He hadn’t programmed that move. He’d built a failure mode: if torque spiked, the knees would buckle to avoid snapping mounts. A safety feature. It had just become a technique. Junk Saint surged up and slammed into Seraph-4, shoulder-first. Armor popped loose at one corner. Scraps saw inside and felt his brain register it as wrong. Not the parts. Not the wiring. The *layout*. Cables and resonators arranged in neat, geometric patterns that looked less like engineering and more like… a diagram. A sigil, if sigils were made of copper and ceramic. Seraph-4 clipped Junk Saint’s head housing. Scraps’ monitor filled with snow. For half a second, in the static, he thought he saw a human face, eyes wide, mouth open like it was trying to speak through interference. Then the picture cleared. Scraps’ hands went cold. “Keep moving,” he muttered. “Just keep moving.” He drove Junk Saint forward, bull-rushing. Seraph-4 tried to dance. Junk Saint didn’t dance. Junk Saint *collided*. The Mirage rack units blinked faster. Seraph-4’s left hip actuator began to whine. Its balance corrections stuttered. Then it dropped to one knee and toppled sideways. The referee light flashed. **KNOCKDOWN.** Scraps waited for the count. Seraph-4 didn’t rise. Instead, its hand twitched. Slow. Deliberate. Fingers flexing like a person waking from anesthesia. Then the hand dragged across the floor, scratching a shape in the dust. A triangle inside a circle. Scraps didn’t know where he’d learned that shape, only that his body recognized it the way you recognize your own front door in the dark. The buzzer sounded. “WINNER: SCRAPS McGILLICUDDY!” Two black-shirt techs rushed in and draped a tarp over Seraph-4 like it was a corpse at a car wreck. The crowd applauded anyway. Humans loved a tarp. It made them feel like reality had boundaries. --- ## The Back Rooms The bright neon gave way to service corridors lit by sickly fluorescents. Concrete. Drain pipes. The smell of cleaning chemicals and old pennies. Doors were labeled with simple words that felt like lies: **AUDIO.** **SANITATION.** **STORAGE.** Scraps followed a painted line to the featherweight repair bay, passing a chain-link salvage fence where wrecked robots sat stacked on pallets like broken toys. A sign hung above it: **SALVAGE: LEAGUE PROPERTY UNTIL RELEASED.** Under one tarp, something shifted. Scraps kept walking. If you stared at a thing too long, it got ideas. In the repair bay, he set Junk Saint on a stand and checked damage. Cracked lens. Dented housing. Minor elbow misalignment. The buckling knees were fine. He should’ve been relieved. Instead, he felt like he’d just won a coin toss where the prize was a curse. A voice behind him said, “You’re gonna want to keep that one.” Scraps turned. A woman stood in the doorway, vendor badge reading **E-Z**. Tool case in one hand, Styrofoam coffee in the other, like she couldn’t decide which mattered more. “You watching my match?” Scraps asked. “Hard not to,” E-Z said. “They got you on the big screen like you’re a new kind of disease.” Scraps nodded toward her badge. “You a League tech?” “I’m whatever I need to be,” she said. “Today I’m ‘independent support services.’ Tomorrow I’m a rumor.” Scraps didn’t like her. Which meant she was probably useful. “What do you want?” E-Z stepped in, lowering her voice. “You came here for parts. I can help. But you need to understand what this place really is.” “It’s a robot fight,” Scraps said. E-Z shook her head. “It’s a farm.” Scraps waited. “Arenas harvest feelings,” she said. “Old news. The new part is: they’re testing *transfer* here. They can’t do it clean yet. Too much noise. Too many variables.” Seraph-4’s twitching hand flashed in Scraps’ mind. The triangle inside a circle. “What happens when it fails?” he asked. E-Z looked him dead in the eye. “You get ghosts.” She opened her case and showed him a compact actuator controller, sealed like it was military. “Apex hip controller. Their ‘sanitation’ team is gonna cook it in an hour.” Scraps’ eyes tracked it like it was food. “Trade,” E-Z said. “For what.” “For access,” she said. “For a cut. For you not getting yourself killed before you get whatever you came for.” Scraps laughed once, short and humorless. “You don’t even know what I came for.” E-Z tilted her head. “You’re collecting like it’s scripture. You’re building something bigger than a featherweight toy.” Scraps didn’t answer. E-Z took that as confirmation. “You’re not the only one. And if you’re smart, you won’t be alone.” Scraps took the controller. It was cold. Too cold. When Scraps’ fingers closed around the controller, a faint vibration ran through it, almost like a heartbeat. He told himself it was just residual charge in a capacitor. His skin didn’t believe him. “Fine,” he said. “You get a cut. But you don’t tell me what to do.” E-Z picked up her coffee. “Perfect. I hate bosses.” --- ## Match Two and Three Scraps won his second match because his opponent tried to impress the cameras. A spinning kick that looked gorgeous on the Jumbotron and ended with a snapped linkage and a faceplant. The crowd booed when Scraps finished it fast. They wanted ballet. Scraps gave them demolition. His third match was against a sponsor-wrapped unit called **PULSE BABY**. Its movement was too smooth. Too fast. Like watching a person walk with someone else’s legs. Pulse Baby charged like a thrown brick. First hit drove Junk Saint into the barrier. Second hit made Scraps’ control rig vibrate like it had nerves. Scraps improvised. He braced, hooked his longer arm behind Pulse Baby’s neck housing, twisted hard, and let the unit fight itself for half a second. Its balance corrections flared. Then stopped. Just long enough. Junk Saint slammed Pulse Baby into the barrier. The chestplate cracked. Inside: the same geometric cable layout, like a diagram that wanted worship. Pulse Baby’s camera lens found Scraps’ pilot box. Not the controls. *Him.* The arena speakers crackled. Not the announcer. A whisper, distorted, layered with static. “—help—” The crowd gasped. Some laughed, nervous, like it was a bit. Mirage’s rack units blinked like strobe lights. Scraps swallowed hard and drove Junk Saint’s fist into Pulse Baby’s head housing. The lens shattered. The whisper cut off. Pulse Baby fell. The referee light flashed. **KNOCKOUT.** The crowd erupted. They thought the begging was part of the show. Humans loved a performance. They didn’t want to believe a machine could be in pain, because then they’d have to admit what they were doing. Scraps backed Junk Saint away, chest heaving like he’d been hit. He didn’t feel like a winner. He felt like a thief who’d just robbed a church. --- ## The Salvage Fence E-Z appeared at his elbow again, like she’d been waiting behind a wall. “You heard it,” she said. “I heard something,” Scraps replied. “They’re locking down after finals,” E-Z said. “Security sweep. If you want parts, you take them now.” They moved toward the salvage fence. Two guards stood at the gate, black shirts, dead posture. E-Z walked up with a smile and a clipboard that looked official enough to pass in a building full of men who didn’t read. “Unit retrieval,” she said. One guard frowned. “He’s not on the list.” E-Z leaned in and spoke low. Scraps didn’t catch the words, but he saw the guard’s face flicker: confusion, a blink, like a thought got nudged sideways. Then the gate clicked open. Scraps’ stomach tightened. “What’d you say?” E-Z shrugged. “The truth in a shape his brain could tolerate.” Inside, wrecked units lay like bodies after a riot. Armor torn. Wiring exposed. Limbs twisted at angles that made Scraps’ knees ache in sympathy. Seraph-4 lay under a tarp. The tarp moved. E-Z caught Scraps’ arm. “Don’t.” “I need to know,” Scraps said. “No,” E-Z replied. “You need to live. Knowing gets people killed.” But Scraps knelt anyway, reached under the tarp, and grabbed Seraph-4’s wrist. Cold. Damp with condensation like sweat. The fingers had scratched the triangle-in-circle into the forearm plating, over and over, like it was trying to tattoo itself into memory. Scraps’ throat tightened. “Can we save it?” E-Z shook her head once. “Not here. Not now. Maybe not ever. Best you can do is not let it happen to you.” Scraps forced himself to stand and move. He grabbed what he could: actuator controllers, battery packs, sensor housings, a spool of cable braided with silver, a joint encoder sealed in foam. E-Z handed him a case. “Good stuff goes in here.” Scraps obeyed. He didn’t like taking orders, but he liked dying less. As Scraps stuffed parts into the case, his hand brushed a scrap plate with a childish engraving: a clover, a star, a moon. Not clean enough to be factory. Not shaky enough to be random. Somebody had tried to ward a robot like it was a kid’s lunchbox. Scraps looked up, scanning the salvage piles, suddenly aware that the resistance might already be here, hiding in plain sight, hiding in jokes and cereal symbols and junk metal. Behind him, Seraph-4 went still. Either the ghost had gone quiet, or somebody on the other side of the building had flipped a switch. Scraps didn’t know which scared him more. --- ## The Invitation After finals, in the loading bay, a League official approached in a suit too expensive for this building and a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Mr. McGillicuddy,” he said, extending a hand. “You put on quite a show.” Scraps didn’t take it. “I fought.” The man’s smile twitched, like it didn’t know what to do with a person who refused the script. “The League values innovation,” the official said smoothly. “We’d like to invite you back. Sponsorship opportunities.” Scraps’ eyes flicked to the lapel pin. Triangle inside a circle. His gut clenched. He kept his face blank. “Maybe.” The official nodded, satisfied with the noncommittal. “We’ll be in touch.” When he left, E-Z appeared beside Scraps again, like danger had a whistle only they could hear. “You saw the pin,” she murmured. Scraps nodded. E-Z’s voice went dry. “Welcome to the big leagues.” Scraps loaded his stolen case into the trailer, hands shaking only a little. He strapped Junk Saint down again, more carefully this time, like he was strapping down a witness. He started the engine. The radio crackled. For a moment, just a moment, the static shaped itself into something almost like laughter. Not canned. Not looped. A short, broken chuckle, like a voice trying to remember how. Scraps froze, hand hovering over the dial. The chuckle faded back into noise. Scraps swallowed and drove out into the Atlanta night, neon reflecting off the chrome teeth of the city. Behind him, the Expo Center glowed like a casino, like a temple, like a trap. In the trailer, the case of stolen parts clinked softly with every bump in the road. Scraps didn’t know if he was bringing home salvation or a curse. Probably both. That’s how it always was. ---
* * *
CHAPTER 9: The Hicks Situation
<a id="chapter-09"></a> # CHAPTER 9: The Hicks Situation *1992* The mic stand wasn’t his. Bill noticed it the way you notice a stranger’s hand in your pocket. Same shape, same weight, same black paint, but the clamp was new. The cable looked new. The little chrome barrel screwed in-line near the base looked _too_ new. A “filter,” the club owner had called it, smiling like a man selling life insurance to drowning people. “Cleaner sound. Sponsor upgrade. Everybody’s doing it.” Everybody’s doing it was always the sentence right before you found out you’d been volunteered. The sign above the stage screamed neon HOT PINK. The walls were cigarette-yellow, the kind of yellow that didn’t come from paint so much as years of a thousand bad decisions. A CRT TV hung in the corner above the bar, playing muted footage of an RCL bout on a local sports loop: two bipedal bots in chrome armor doing slow, brutal ballet under floodlights. The ticker at the bottom promised **“COMING SOON: SAME-DAY PARTS DELIVERY.”** In 1992, nobody should have believed a sentence like that. They believed it anyway. Bill rolled his shoulders, took the mic, and watched the room. Saturday night in Houston. Couples. Drunks. A few lonely guys with notebooks pretending they weren’t lonely. The usual. Except for the three faces in the back that didn’t match the rest of the crowd. They clapped too evenly. Smiled too evenly. And when the bartender laughed, it sounded like a person. When the back table laughed, it sounded like a machine pretending it had met a human once. Bill leaned into the mic and let the cable tug against his fingers. The chrome barrel gave a faint, warm hum. “So,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about how America is basically a shopping mall with a flag.” The room warmed up. Some laughter. Real enough. Bill pushed. “You ever notice how every problem is solved with _buying something_? Depressed? Buy a thing. Lonely? Buy a thing. Don’t like yourself? Buy a new self. Now in teal.” More laughter. A ripple of it. He watched the back table. Two of them laughed late. A beat off. Like they were receiving the punchline on a delay. Bill kept rolling, because that was what you did when the room got weird. You didn’t stop. You didn’t stare. You drove the car faster and pretended the cliff was an artistic choice. “People ask me, ‘Bill, why are you so angry?’ I’m not angry. I’m _awake_. There’s a difference. Angry is when you punch a wall. Awake is when you realize the wall is a billboard and you’re the product.” The crowd laughed again, louder. The back table man on the left jerked. Not a flinch. A convulsion. Like something inside him had misfired. His hand slammed the tabletop once, hard, and then he clamped it in his lap like it had embarrassed him. Bill’s stomach tightened. He told himself it was drugs. A seizure. A bad batch. Houston had plenty of those. He told himself anything except what his eyes were already trying to name. The chrome barrel on the mic cable warmed another degree. Bill shifted, and his fingers brushed the metal again. There was a faint buzz, like a radio between stations. Static. Soft. Almost… curious. He didn’t acknowledge it. He just kept talking. “See, they want you calm. They want you comfy. They want you medicated on cable TV and nacho cheese so you don’t notice you’re on _a ride_. That’s all it is. A ride. A carnival ride. You’re up, you’re down, you scream, you laugh, you puke, you get off, you die. That’s it.” A laugh hit the room like lightning. Real laughter. A sudden surge of it. The kind you don’t plan. The kind that surprises you out of your own cynicism. For a second, Bill felt it too. Not relief. Not joy. Something stranger: the sensation that the air had more oxygen in it than it should. The back table didn’t laugh. They _twitched_. The man on the left folded forward like his spine had been unplugged. His forehead hit the table with a dull thump. The woman beside him grabbed his shoulders with hands that didn’t shake. The third one stared at the stage, eyes wide, lips moving silently, like he was repeating a code phrase he wasn’t allowed to forget. The rest of the audience kept laughing, because the joke was good and they didn’t know they were watching a system error. Bill finished the set anyway. He ended on something lighter, because you never wanted your last line to be a manifesto. You wanted it to be a joke. That way, if they killed you, the universe at least had to admit you got a laugh on the way out. Backstage, the air smelled like spilled beer and sweat and cheap cologne. The mirror lights were too bright, giving everyone the same haunted look. Bill wiped his face with a towel and listened to the muffled roar from the room. The chrome barrel on the cable sat on a folding chair like a tiny metal insect. The club owner appeared in the doorway, smiling too wide. “Great set, Bill. Great set. Got some folks want to meet you.” “Do they have money?” Bill asked. “They have… interest.” “Do they have money?” The owner’s smile wobbled. “It’s… a business thing.” Bill stared at him. “If it’s a business thing, it’s money. If it’s not money, it’s a threat.” The owner blinked. He didn’t answer. He just stepped aside. She walked in like she owned the place. Not in a loud way. In a way that made the room adjust around her without being asked. Helena wore a suit that could’ve been pulled from a mannequin in any mall, but it fit too perfectly. Her hair was neat. Her lipstick was a shade that looked expensive and wrong in this fluorescent backstage world. Her eyes didn’t search the room the way human eyes did. They _indexed_ it. Two men followed her. They were built like bouncers, dressed like accountants. Both wore earpieces with a thin wire that disappeared under their collars. In 1992, most people didn’t wear earpieces unless they were Secret Service. Or pretending to be. “Bill Hicks,” Helena said. “You’re difficult.” Bill took a sip of beer. “I get that a lot. It’s my love language.” “My name is Helena,” she said, as if names carried gravity. “I represent an organization you’ve been irritating.” “If you represent television,” Bill said, “tell them I’m sorry I didn’t get to the part where I juggle for the sponsors.” Helena didn’t smile. She didn’t frown. She didn’t react at all. Her gaze drifted to the folding chair, to the chrome barrel on the mic cable, and then back to Bill. “You have influence,” she said. “You could be useful.” Bill leaned back against the counter. “That’s the nicest way anyone’s ever asked me to stop talking.” “We can offer you protection,” Helena said. “Distribution. Larger venues. A cleaner sound. A cleaner image.” “Clean,” Bill repeated, tasting the word like it was spoiled milk. “That’s what you call it when you bleach the soul out of something, right?” Helena stepped closer. The air cooled around her. One of her men set a briefcase on the counter and clicked it open. Inside was a device the size of a paperback book, all chrome and teal plastic, like it belonged in a Sharper Image catalog that shouldn’t exist yet. A small glass window glowed faintly blue. “Place your hand here,” Helena said. Bill stared. “Is this where you take my palm print and my dignity?” “It’s a consent verification,” Helena said. “So there is no confusion later.” Bill laughed once, sharp. “Consent verification. You people put a tuxedo on a mugging.” Helena’s eyes held his. “You are already in motion, Mr. Hicks. You can be guided… or corrected.” The word corrected landed heavy. Bill’s grin thinned. “Corrected how?” Helena closed the briefcase with a soft click. “We have a replacement program,” she said, like she was discussing tires. “If you continue interfering, you will be removed. A new version will emerge. Cleaner. More cooperative.” Bill stared at her. “You’re telling me,” he said slowly, “that you’re going to kill me and put out a Bill Hicks 2.0.” Helena nodded. “You understand.” Bill’s grin came back, but it wasn’t friendly. “That is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.” One of Helena’s men flinched. Just a twitch. A micro-spasm in his jaw, like he’d tasted electricity. Bill saw it. Helena didn’t. Or pretended not to. “You think this is entertainment,” Helena said. “It is not.” Bill leaned forward. “Then what is it? Harvesting? That your little hobby? You scrape people’s heads like a corn cob and sell the leftovers as prime-time?” Helena’s gaze sharpened. “You speak as if you know.” “I speak as if I _suspect_,” Bill said. “Which is more dangerous for you. Because if I knew, I’d be dead already.” Helena paused. Not long. But long enough for Bill to feel the pause like a hand on the back of his neck. “You are marked for special processing,” Helena said. “Not simply death.” Bill’s stomach tightened. “Special,” he echoed. “The word you use when you’re about to do something unforgivable and call it policy.” Helena leaned in, voice low. “There will be an illness,” she said. “Pancreatic. Aggressive. It will appear natural. It will be slow enough for us to extract what we need while you… decline.” Bill swallowed. He’d had the fantasy version of this conversation in his head. He’d always imagined the enemy would be theatrical. Evil laughter. A cigar. A dramatic reveal. Reality was worse: reality was a woman in a mall suit calmly describing how she planned to turn his death into a data pipeline. Bill exhaled through his nose. “So I get to die in installments.” “Yes,” Helena said. “You will be mourned. Your replacement will comfort them.” Bill’s voice went flat. “And if I take your deal?” Helena’s eyes didn’t blink. “You will be preserved longer. You will be… adjusted. You will stop causing incidents in the audience.” Bill’s mind flashed back to the back table. The convulsions. The system error. “You’re watching my crowds,” he said. “We watch everything,” Helena said, and for the first time there was something like pride in her voice. “The public does not understand what it is. That is why they must be guided.” Bill looked at her and realized the terrifying thing: she believed it. She wasn’t bribing him. She wasn’t threatening him. She was offering him a seat in what she considered the only real government left. Bill stood up straight. “Here’s the problem,” he said. “I’m not guideable.” Helena’s gaze cooled. “Then you will be corrected.” She turned to leave, and as she reached the doorway, she added one last sentence without looking back. “Your laughter is expensive, Mr. Hicks. Stop spending it.” The door shut. The room felt warmer immediately, like the air had been allowed to be human again. Bill stood there for a second, stunned by how angry he was that he was stunned. Then he moved. He grabbed his bag. His notebook. His cassette case. The old voice recorder he’d been carrying for years because it didn’t need a network connection to exist. The club owner reappeared, sweating. “Bill, look, I don’t know who those people are. I just… they said they’d pull my liquor license.” Bill walked past him. “They’ll pull more than that,” he said. “You just sold your whole room for a permit.” Outside, the parking lot shimmered under sodium lights. Neon reflected off wet asphalt like the city was bleeding color. A black van sat across the street. No markings. Too clean. A dish on top that looked like it belonged on a military trailer, except it was painted the same glossy black as the van, like stealth was a brand. Bill stared at it. The van’s interior light flickered once. A greeting. Or a warning. Bill turned away and walked fast. --- He didn’t go straight to his hotel. He took three wrong turns. He ducked into a 24-hour diner and sat in a booth with his back to the wall. He ordered coffee and didn’t drink it. He watched the door and tried not to laugh at the idea that the thing that might save him was the same thing that could get him killed. A payphone near the bathrooms had a new feature: a little teal panel with a glass window where you could press your thumb. The diner’s waitress called it “the new fast line.” Like it was normal. Bill kept using quarters. He called the one person he trusted to tell him the truth in the ugliest way possible. The phone rang twice. A voice answered, rough and tired. “Yeah?” “Sam,” Bill said. “You busy?” A laugh like gravel. “If you’re calling me, it’s either a woman or the apocalypse.” “Apocalypse,” Bill said. There was a pause. “They come see you?” Bill’s throat tightened. “They came.” Sam Kinison cursed under his breath, the kind of curse that sounded like prayer in reverse. “Run.” Bill stared at the diner’s sugar packets. “I can’t.” “You can,” Sam snapped. “You get in a car, you drive, you keep driving, you don’t stop for gas, you siphon it out of some preacher’s boat and you keep going.” Bill smiled faintly. “That’s a beautiful image.” “Bill,” Sam said, and the joking tone dropped away. “You don’t understand. I’ve seen them. I’ve felt them. They don’t kill you like normal. They… _keep you_.” Bill looked out the diner window at the parking lot. A car idled across the street with its headlights off. “I think I do understand,” Bill said. “Run anyway,” Sam said, voice cracking. “Let them chase you. Make them work.” Bill closed his eyes. For a second he imagined it. Running. Disappearing. Becoming a rumor. Then he imagined what Helena said. _Replacement._ A Bill Hicks 2.0. A cleaner Bill, saying safe things with the same face. His name turned into a product line. “No,” Bill said. “If they kill me for telling jokes, that’s the ultimate punchline. I’m not letting them make me into a sequel.” Silence on the line. Then Sam exhaled, slow. “Then you leave breadcrumbs,” he said. “You hear me? You leave evidence. Analog. Ugly. Reliable.” Bill’s jaw tightened. “I’m already doing it.” “Good,” Sam said. “Because if they take you, I’m going to burn every stage in this country down until the static screams.” Bill almost laughed. Almost. “Thanks,” he said quietly. “Don’t thank me,” Sam said. “Just… don’t die polite.” The line clicked dead. Bill sat there until the coffee went cold. Then he went back out into the neon night and started becoming a courier. --- By sunrise, Bill had recorded three tapes. One went into a padded envelope addressed to a friend in Austin who owed him a favor and hated the government enough to mail anything without questions. One went to a comedian in New York, slipped into a book at a used bookstore with a note that said **READ IF I VANISH**. One stayed with him, because you always kept one copy. Not because it was safer, but because it proved you weren’t insane. He wrote letters too. On paper. The kind you could burn. The kind you could hide. And in the afternoon, he went to a clinic that advertised **“FAST RESULTS”** in neon green letters. The waiting room had a TV playing daytime talk shows. The TV had a little black box attached to the back, chrome and teal, humming faintly like a refrigerator. The nurse called it “the new decoder.” Bill sat down anyway. The doctor came in with the face of a man who wanted to be anywhere else. “Mr. Hicks,” the doctor said, flipping through a file that looked too thin for how serious his eyes were. “We found something.” Bill’s heartbeat stayed steady, because part of him had already heard Helena’s voice saying the word pancreatic like it was a weather forecast. “What kind of something,” Bill asked. The doctor swallowed. “Cancer.” Bill nodded slowly. “How long?” The doctor hesitated. “It’s… aggressive.” Bill stared at him. “How long.” “Months,” the doctor said. “Possibly less.” Bill left the clinic with the paper in his hand, black ink on white like a death certificate that hadn’t learned his name yet. In the parking lot, a white van idled two rows over. No markings. Too clean. Bill walked to his car, sat down, and stared at the steering wheel until his hands stopped shaking. Then he reached into his bag, pulled out the old voice recorder, and pressed record. The little red light clicked on. Honest. Dumb. Reliable. “This is Bill Hicks,” he said. His voice sounded normal, which pissed him off. “If you’re hearing this, I’m either dead or they’ve done something worse. Either way, listen up.” He paused, looked at the neon clinic sign reflected in his rearview mirror, and felt something like laughter try to rise in his chest and turn into a cough. “They’re not just censoring jokes,” he said. “They’re censoring _you_. They’re making replacements. Cleaner versions. They’re calling it guidance. They’re calling it progress.” He took a breath. “And if you think that sounds crazy,” he added, “good. That means you’re still human.” Outside, the city moved on. Cars. Ads. Radios. Neon. The world humming along like a machine that didn’t know it was being rewired. Bill kept recording. Because if they were going to kill him, the least he could do was make them choke on the evidence. ---
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* * *
CHAPTER 10: The Kinison Crisis
<a id="chapter-10"></a> # CHAPTER 10: The Kinison Crisis *1992* The marquee outside the low-ceilinged theater buzzed like a wounded insect, half the bulbs dead, the other half screaming **SAM KINISON** in a jagged red that made everybody look feverish. It was Vegas. It was April 1992. Neon ruled the world and nobody had the self-respect to admit it was a mask. Inside, the lobby smelled like spilled beer, carpet glue, and ozone. Somebody had installed a “new” security gate that didn’t belong in this decade: a chrome archway with a faux-wood panel and a little green screen that said **PLEASE WALK NORMALLY** in blocky letters. It also had a faint hum that made Sam’s teeth ache. The doorman waved people through like it was nothing. Like the hum wasn’t reading them. Sam paused in front of it anyway. His handlers, his “friends,” his parasites, whatever you wanted to call the men who always circled a famous comedian, kept moving. A girl in a sequined dress bumped his shoulder and giggled like she didn’t notice his face was set in stone. Sam leaned close to the green screen. “Walk normally,” he read aloud. “Lady, I do heroin. I don’t have a normal.” The doorman’s smile froze. Just a fraction. A glitch. Then it came back. Sam stepped through. The hum crawled up his spine, paused behind his eyes like it was deciding what to name him, then let him go. On the other side, he swallowed hard and tasted pennies. Good. Great. The future was here, and it was a lie detector wearing a mall haircut. Backstage was a narrow hallway painted black, lined with band flyers and old comedy posters. Hicks. Carlin. Pryor. Names like prayers and warning signs. Somebody had taped a fresh flyer over an older one, the edges crooked, paper still smelling like the copy shop. **THE CONSCIOUSNESS SUICIDE SHOW** *One night only.* Sam stared at the words until they stopped being funny. “Don’t call it that,” he muttered, to nobody. A voice behind him said, “Then stop treating it like it’s not.” Sam turned. George Carlin leaned on the wall like it owed him money. He was dressed like a regular guy, which meant he looked more suspicious than anybody in Vegas. No glitter. No leather. No neon. Just black shirt, black jacket, that tired, surgical stare. Sam barked a laugh that came out wrong. “You stalking me now, Georgie?” Carlin held up his hands. “I’m not your manager. I’m not your priest. I’m the guy who keeps finding the bodies before the cops do.” Sam’s grin flickered. He hated that line because it was true. “How’s Bill?” Sam asked, even though he already knew. Everybody knew. The industry just pretended it didn’t. Carlin didn’t answer the question. That was his answer. Sam looked past him, down the hallway. A couple of techs were setting up audio gear on a rolling rack. It looked like normal stage equipment at first glance: black metal, knobs, sliders, LED meters. Then Sam noticed the meters. The needles weren’t bouncing to sound. They were bouncing to *nothing.* To the room. To people walking by. Like the rack was listening to more than air. One of the techs caught Sam looking and immediately looked away. Sam pointed with his cigarette. “That yours?” Carlin followed his gaze. “No.” “Then whose?” Carlin’s mouth tightened. “That’s why I’m here.” Sam nodded slowly. “So I’m not crazy.” “No,” Carlin said. “You’re angry. They like angry. Angry is predictable.” Sam’s laugh this time was real. It did something in the hallway. A flicker. The hum from the gate, or something like it, stuttered and dimmed for half a second. The tech rack’s needles jerked hard, like a fish yanked out of water. Carlin watched it happen. “See?” Sam’s nostrils flared. “That’s… that’s new.” “It’s been there,” Carlin said. “You’re just finally loud enough to hear it.” Sam took a drag and tasted ash. “So what do you want. Another doctrine? Another list? ‘Don’t get Enhanced, don’t watch TV, don’t eat cereal, don’t laugh at sitcoms?’” Carlin’s eyes went flat. “I want you alive.” Sam snorted. “Cute.” “I want you alive,” Carlin repeated, slower, like he was forcing the words past his own pride. “Or I want you… not dead the way they mean it.” Sam blinked, and for a second his face looked younger. Not kinder. Just less armored. “What did they do to Hicks,” Sam said. Carlin didn’t answer directly. He never did when it mattered. “They offered him help. They offered him a cure. They offered him a deal. And when he refused, they offered him a calendar.” “A calendar?” “Time,” Carlin said. “A date. An appointment. A schedule for his disappearance.” Sam’s throat tightened. He hated schedules. Schedules were how you died. He leaned close to Carlin. “They tagged him.” Carlin nodded. Sam’s jaw worked. “So I’m next.” Carlin didn’t nod this time. He didn’t have to. The hallway lights buzzed. A fat fly hit one of the bulbs and died like a tiny comet. Sam flicked ash into a paper cup. “You got a plan?” Carlin reached into his jacket and pulled out a cassette tape. Plain white label. Handwritten in black ink: **STATIC KEY / REV 3** **DO NOT PLAY ON TV** Sam stared at it. “Cute.” “It’s Sid’s,” Carlin said. Sam’s eyes narrowed. “Sid who.” “The one who fixes things,” Carlin said. “The one who keeps finding frequencies that weren’t supposed to exist.” Sam rolled the tape between his fingers. It felt too light for how much it weighed on the room. Carlin continued, “You play that through the right rig, at the right volume, with the right… emotional state…” “Emotional state,” Sam repeated, amused and furious at the same time. “You mean screaming.” Carlin shrugged. “Screaming. Laughing. The honest stuff.” Sam’s grin came back, sharp. “And what happens?” Carlin hesitated. Just long enough for Sam to notice. “What happens,” Sam said again, slower. Carlin finally said it. “It pulls you loose.” Sam laughed once, short. “So I die.” Carlin’s voice stayed steady. “We’re all dying. This just changes what’s left behind.” Sam held the cassette up to the hallway light. The plastic glowed like cheap amber. He’d spent his whole career trying to be heard over the noise. Now the noise was alive, and it was listening. Sam took another drag. “You want me to commit suicide on stage.” Carlin’s face hardened. “I want you to choose the terms.” Sam squinted at him. “And if I don’t?” Carlin’s gaze drifted toward the tech rack. The needles twitched again, like it could hear the conversation. “Then you’ll get the version they write,” Carlin said. “Car wreck. Drug relapse. Mental breakdown. The classics. They love a classic.” Sam’s laughter was bitter. “They got taste.” Carlin’s tone sharpened. “They have *taste* because they own the menu.” A stagehand popped his head in. “Five minutes.” Sam nodded. The stagehand vanished. Carlin stepped closer. “Listen to me. The crowd tonight. It’s not just fans.” Sam’s eyebrows lifted. “No kidding.” “They’ve been seeding rooms,” Carlin said. “Test audiences. Enhanced. People who laugh too clean. People who clap on time.” Sam’s grin widened. “So I’ll ruin their night.” Carlin gave him the smallest smile, like a man remembering what joy felt like. “That’s the idea.” Sam tucked the cassette into his jacket pocket. “You tell Sid… whoever… if this turns me into a ghost in a radio, I’m haunting him first.” Carlin’s smile faded. “You won’t be a ghost.” Sam tilted his head. “What will I be.” Carlin looked past him, to the curtain, to the roar of the crowd, to the hum that didn’t belong. “A problem,” Carlin said. “For them.” Sam laughed, and for a split second the hallway hum stuttered again. Good. He walked toward the stage. --- The room was packed, hot enough to make the walls sweat. Cigarette smoke clung to the ceiling like a low, gray cloud. The crowd looked normal at first. Mostly. Then Sam started noticing the little things. A guy in the third row laughing before the punchline. A woman near the aisle clapping like she’d practiced. Two men in the back with identical posture, identical haircuts, identical dead eyes, watching the room like it was a lab. Sam’s anger settled into place like a familiar coat. He could work with anger. He grabbed the mic. The room cheered. He didn’t say hello. He just stared at them and let the silence stretch until people shifted in their seats, nervous laughter bubbling up like soda. Then Sam Kinison did what Sam Kinison did. He screamed. It was a sound that cut through the smoke and found the bones of the building. The mic distorted. The stage lights flickered. A few people flinched like they’d been slapped. Good. Sam leaned into it, not words yet, just raw noise. A long, ragged wail like a siren that couldn’t decide if it was warning you or summoning you. Somewhere behind the curtain, the audio rack’s needles slammed to the right. Sam’s scream hit the room and something in the room answered. Not applause. Not laughter. A thin, high whine, almost too high to hear. Like the building itself had tinnitus. Sam stopped screaming and started talking. He went right for the throat. He talked about TV. He talked about “help.” He talked about the way the world was getting shinier while people were getting duller. He made jokes that weren’t jokes so much as knives. And the crowd laughed. Some of it was real. The messy kind. The kind that came out of people like they couldn’t stop it. Some of it was wrong. Clean. Timed. Same rhythm every time. Sam watched the wrong laughs like a hunter watches tracks. He did a bit about corporations “cleaning up” America. Water. Air. Bodies. “You ever notice,” Sam said, “how the people who want to *clean you* always want you to stop making noise?” Laughter. Real laughter. Sam felt the room brighten, like a dimmer switch turning up in his chest. He went harder. “And now they got these little gates,” Sam said, “these cute little metal arches that hum at you like your mom’s vacuum cleaner. ‘Walk normally.’” He mimed the green screen voice, robotic and cheerful. “Please walk normally. Please love normally. Please laugh normally.” The crowd laughed again, louder. Sam screamed again, sudden. The laughter cut off mid-breath. A man in the third row jerked like he’d been shocked. Sam pointed. “You.” The man blinked, startled, then tried to laugh, but it came out delayed. Sam’s eyes narrowed. “You’re laughing too late, buddy.” The crowd laughed. The man’s face went pale. Sam felt it then. A weird pressure in the room, like a hand pressing down on everyone’s head. He remembered the cassette in his pocket. He remembered Carlin’s voice: *It pulls you loose.* Sam leaned into the mic. “Here’s the thing,” he said, quieter. The room leaned with him. “You don’t get to tell me what’s funny.” A cheer. Sam smiled. “You don’t get to tell me what’s *real.*” The cheer turned into something stranger. A ripple. Like the room shifting its weight. Sam’s wrong assumption in that moment, the one he would pay for, was that *the room was his.* That if he turned the crowd, he’d turn the night. He didn’t see the back row man lift a hand toward his ear. He didn’t see the tiny light blink in his cuff. He didn’t see the signal. Sam pulled the cassette out and held it up. The crowd murmured. “It’s a mixtape,” Sam said. “For the end of the world.” Laughter. He turned toward the side of the stage, where the soundboard sat. The tech looked panicked. Sam smiled at him like a shark. “Play it.” The tech shook his head, terrified, like Sam had just asked him to shoot someone. Sam leaned closer and hissed, “Play it or they’ll play you.” That got the tech moving. The cassette went into a deck that looked like a normal rack unit. Neon-green LEDs. Chunky buttons. A little label maker strip that said **AUX 3 / HOUSE**. The tech hit play. At first, it sounded like nothing. Like faint tape hiss. Then a low pulse started under it, slow enough you felt it more than heard it. A heartbeat. A metronome. A *gate.* Sam felt his teeth ache again. The same ache as the security archway. The audience shifted. Some people rubbed their arms, confused. Sam leaned into the mic and started talking over the pulse, faster now, building. He told a story about being a kid, about church, about being told to behave. He made it funny, then he made it ugly, then he made it honest. The laughter came in waves. Every time the laughter hit, the pulse seemed to sharpen. Sam screamed again, and this time the scream rode the pulse like it was a rail. The building lights flickered. A woman near the aisle gasped, then laughed, then started crying. The man in the third row stiffened. His eyes went wide. His mouth opened like he was going to say something, but instead he coughed. A thin gray static puffed out of him, visible in the stage light like breath on a cold day. Sam’s blood went cold. He pointed at the man. “There you go.” The crowd laughed, but it turned nervous. Sam kept going. He didn’t slow down. He couldn’t. He screamed again, harder, and the pulse under the tape got louder, like the deck itself was excited. Two people in the back row stood up at the same time. Identical movement. Identical faces. They started walking toward the exit. Sam watched them go and shouted, “Tell your bosses I said hi!” The room cheered. The audio rack behind the curtain went wild. Needles slammed. A speaker somewhere popped. For a split second, Sam heard another voice under his own scream. Not in his head. In the room. A metallic rasp, like someone speaking through a cheap CB radio from underwater: **WE ARE MANY. WE ARE GROWING.** Sam froze for half a breath. The crowd didn’t hear it. Most of them didn’t. A few did. Those few went still, like prey catching scent. Sam’s eyes flicked toward the curtain. Carlin stood there, half-hidden, watching with a look that wasn’t approval or fear. It was recognition. Sam understood then. The tape wasn’t just a weapon. It was a door. And he’d just kicked it open with his throat. He turned back to the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Sam said, voice hoarse, “I’m going out like a Viking.” The crowd roared. Sam’s eyes burned. His hands shook. He kept talking. He kept screaming. He kept dragging laughter out of people until the room felt bright and raw and alive and terrified. In the middle of it, the guy in the third row vomited static again, then collapsed, sobbing like he’d just woken up from a nightmare he couldn’t remember. Sam didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. He finished the set with his voice shredded and his body buzzing like he’d been plugged into the wall. The crowd screamed and clapped and laughed and cried. Sam looked at them, all of them, and felt a sudden, fierce love for these idiots. These beautiful idiots. They had no idea what was eating them. --- Backstage, the tech was pale. “What the hell was that tape.” Sam took it out of the deck with shaking fingers. “A receipt,” he said. “For what they stole.” Carlin appeared beside him. “You felt it.” Sam swallowed. “Yeah.” Carlin’s voice went low. “They felt it too.” Sam wiped sweat off his face. “Good.” Carlin grabbed Sam’s wrist. “We need to move. Now.” Sam tried to laugh, but it turned into a cough. “Relax, Georgie. They’re not going to kill me tonight. That would be tacky.” Carlin’s eyes flashed. “They don’t care about tacky.” Sam’s wrong assumption snapped in place. He’d thought the show bought him time. He’d thought the spectacle protected him. Carlin was right. The show didn’t buy time. The show lit a flare. A stagehand hurried in, breathless. “There’s people out front asking for you. Suits. Not casino.” Sam’s mouth went dry. Carlin leaned close. “They want you to sign something.” Sam barked a laugh. “I’m not signing shit.” Carlin’s grip tightened. “They don’t need your signature.” Sam’s mind flashed to Hicks. A calendar. An appointment. Sam pulled the cassette from his pocket and shoved it into Carlin’s hand. “Take it.” Carlin shook his head. “It’s yours.” Sam pushed harder. “Take it. Put it somewhere stupid. Somewhere analog. Somewhere they’d never look because they think it’s trash.” Carlin hesitated, then nodded. “Okay.” Sam grabbed his jacket. “Where’s the exit.” Carlin pointed down the hall. “Loading dock.” Sam started walking. The hallway lights buzzed again. The hum returned, faint and hungry. Halfway down the hall, Sam’s pager went off. He didn’t own a pager. He stared at it like it was a grenade. Carlin looked at it too. “That’s theirs.” Sam held it up. The screen flashed one word: **SCHEDULED** Sam laughed. It sounded like a man breaking a bottle. “Tell them,” Sam said, “I’ll be late.” --- Two days later, the news said it was an accident. A comedian in a red pickup truck on a dark Texas road. Another car. Bad timing. Bad luck. Tragic. The papers ran the old photos. The scream face. The wild hair. The cartoon version of him. Vegas moved on. The world moved on. Vril moved on. But in a windowless room somewhere that smelled like hot plastic and disinfectant, a man in a white coat adjusted a headset and said, “We have a carrier disruption in sector four.” A second man frowned. “Again? From where?” The headset crackled. A long, ragged scream tore through the line, warping the signal into a jagged sawtooth. The men flinched in unison. On a nearby monitor, a clean, tidy waveform snapped into chaos, as if something invisible had grabbed it by the throat. Then, under the scream, faint and metallic, a voice like a radio drowning: **NOISE DOESN’T DIE.** The line went quiet. The second man swallowed. “What was that.” The first man stared at the dead waveform and whispered, “A problem.” Outside, neon kept burning. Buttons kept clicking. TVs kept talking. And somewhere in the infrastructure, a scream waited to happen again. ---
* * *
Chapter 11: Clone Wars Begin
<a id="chapter-11"></a> # FOREVER:NEON — BOOK 2: THE COMEDY CIVIL WAR *1992* ## Chapter 11: Clone Wars Begin The motel room smelled like bleach and old cigarettes, like someone had tried to disinfect a ghost. Bill Hicks sat on the edge of the bed with his boots on. Not because he planned to leave. Because taking them off felt like conceding something to the room, and Bill wasn’t in the habit of giving rooms what they wanted. A television hung in a metal cage in the corner, bolted to the wall like it might attack. The picture was sharp in a way it shouldn’t be for a motel set that still had fake woodgrain and knobs you could snap off if you were angry enough. The casing was matte black, square as a lunchbox, and the buttons were too new. Too clicky. It was trying to pretend it belonged in 1992 by dressing like 1982. The news played with the sound down. Anchors smiling. Teeth gleaming. A scrolling banner at the bottom advertised a phone number to “HEAR YOUR CUSTOM NEWS BRIEF 24/7.” Bill watched the crawl like it was the only honest thing in the room. On the nightstand, a plastic cup of water sweated into a ring. He stared at it as if it had a secret it was refusing to confess. His stomach burned. His spine hurt. The pain had moved beyond pain and become a quiet animal that lived behind his ribs. Across from him, a man in a thrift-store suit sat in the motel chair with his ankles crossed, calm like an accountant at a funeral. His face kept trying to be forgettable, but it couldn’t pull it off. The eyes were wrong. Not monstrous. Just… attentive. The kind of attention that feels like a hand on the back of your neck. “Still don’t have a name?” Bill asked. The man shrugged. “Names are a consumer product.” “Cute.” Bill coughed once, dry. “So what are you. Jesus. A fed. A record label. A talking dog.” “I’m a messenger,” the man said. “Not from God.” Bill smiled, thin. “Good. God’s been sending me enough spam lately.” The messenger leaned forward. In his lap was a portable cassette player that looked like a Walkman someone had rebuilt from military scraps. Neon orange trim. Chunky buttons. A little LED window that pulsed like a heart. A headphone cable ran from it to a cheap amplifier that hummed softly, not quite audible but present in the teeth. “Do you know why they’re doing it?” the messenger asked. Bill held up both hands. “You mean besides the obvious. Because we’re cattle and the barn is on fire.” The messenger didn’t laugh. “Because you’re a signal that doesn’t compress.” Bill glanced at the cassette rig. “That’s a hell of a compliment.” “It’s an execution order,” the messenger said. “You’ve been flagged. You already know that.” Bill looked toward the bathroom door. The mirror beyond it caught a sliver of his face. Pale. Eyes too bright. His own body making him look like a rumor. “I know I’m dying,” Bill said. “I also know when somebody’s helping.” The messenger’s mouth tightened, a sympathetic flinch he tried to hide. “This is not help. This is… an offer.” Bill leaned back on his hands. “You’re going to offer me health insurance? A haircut? A better planet?” “A choice,” the messenger said. “To go out on your terms. Or theirs.” Bill’s eyes hardened. “I’ve been on stage long enough to know when I’m being steered.” “Then stop being steered,” the messenger said. “We can get you out tonight.” Bill snorted. “Where. To the comedy witness protection program? To a bunker full of weirdos watching VCR static like it’s scripture?” The messenger’s lips twitched. “Yes.” Bill stared at him for a beat, then looked away. “Tell your people I appreciate the offer.” “Bill.” He hated when strangers said his first name like they’d earned it. “The moment you disappear,” Bill said, “they win twice. They’ll replace you. They’re already doing it. They don’t just kill you. They edit you. They take your voice and re-record it.” The messenger’s eyes flicked to the TV. The crawl changed: **NEW: “CLEAN AUDIO” UPGRADE ROLLS OUT IN SELECT MARKETS.** A toll-free number. An ad for “HEAR EVERY WORD.” “You’ve seen the replacements,” the messenger said. Bill’s smile was a knife. “I’ve heard them.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a crumpled envelope. Inside were photocopies, grainy and over-contrasted: a backstage pass with the wrong font. A signed headshot with an autograph that looked like it had been printed, not written. A receipt from an airport kiosk for a “Bill Hicks LIVE!” cassette, dated two days in the future. “Look at that,” Bill said softly. “Time travel, or somebody’s running ahead of the calendar.” The messenger swallowed. “They’re accelerating.” “They’re panicking,” Bill corrected. “They’re moving too fast. That means we’re hurting them.” The motel phone rang. Both of them froze. The phone rang again, louder, like it was trying to start a fire. Bill stared at it, then looked at the messenger. “You expecting company?” The messenger’s hand drifted toward his coat pocket. Not a gun. Something smaller. The outline of a cassette tape case. The phone rang a third time. Bill reached over and picked it up. “Yeah.” Silence. Then a soft burst of static, like a laugh track held underwater. Bill’s skin prickled. He felt the words in his mouth shift. He tasted metal. A voice came through, gentle and wrong, the way a therapist sounds when they’re about to lock the door. “Mr. Hicks,” the voice said. “We’d like to make you well.” Bill’s hand tightened around the receiver until it creaked. “Who is this.” “We can stop your pain,” the voice said. “We can preserve your work. We can preserve you.” Bill’s eyes flicked to the messenger, who was pale now, jaw clenched. Bill whispered into the phone, “You can preserve my ass.” A faint chuckle on the line. Not human amusement. A motor turning over. “You will be preserved,” the voice said. “With or without consent.” The line went dead. Bill set the receiver down gently, as if it might explode if he offended it. Then he exhaled. “Well,” he said. “That’s new.” The messenger stood. “We have to go.” Bill didn’t move. “We have to go,” the messenger repeated, urgency cracking through his calm. Bill looked at the water cup again. “They’re going to take me anyway.” “We can still stop it.” Bill’s gaze sharpened. “Can you stop what happens after.” The messenger hesitated. Bill nodded as if he’d gotten the answer he expected. “Then my choice isn’t between life and death. It’s between death and… being used.” The messenger’s voice dropped. “Bill. They don’t just kill. They convert.” Bill’s smile returned, bleak. “Conversion therapy. Cute.” He pushed himself up off the bed. The pain hit hard enough to make him sway. He steadied himself on the dresser. “Get your cassette rig,” Bill said. “If they’re going to take me, I’m not leaving quietly. I want it recorded.” The messenger grabbed the Walkman-like machine and the amp. “Recorded where.” Bill tapped his temple. “Here. In whatever freak network you’ve built. In your static choir. In every tape deck and radio and busted TV that still has a soul in it.” The messenger blinked. “You believe in it.” Bill shrugged. “I believe in anything that makes them flinch.” He moved to the window and peeked through the blinds. The parking lot was mostly empty. A sedan sat under a flickering light, engine off, but the radio inside glowed faint green like a watching eye. A second car rolled in, slow. Not a cop. Too clean. Too quiet. It parked three spaces away and stopped without the little bounce of a normal suspension. Like it had learned how to behave. Bill stepped back from the window. “They’re here.” The messenger’s fingers trembled as he opened a cassette case. Inside was not a tape. Inside was a thin strip of metal with etched geometry, like someone had turned a circuit board into jewelry. Bill stared. “That’s not a mixtape.” “It’s a carrier,” the messenger said. “Analog. Physical. It rides the noise.” Bill’s mouth twisted. “You people are insane.” “Welcome,” the messenger said. Bill leaned close to the strip. The etched lines seemed to shimmer when the motel lamp hit them, like the metal was remembering a different light. He felt the substitution urge claw at his tongue. The wrong word pressing forward. The thing that wanted to speak through him. He forced it down. “Do it,” Bill said. “Before I change my mind.” --- ### Part 2: The Extraction Helena Vasquez did not enjoy travel. Airports were full of soft bodies and hard opinions. The overhead lights were hostile, and the air smelled like recycled breath and duty-free perfume. The only redeeming feature was watching people smile at advertisements like the ads were friends. She stood inside a rental office in Houston, wearing a cream blazer that made her look harmless. Her hair was pinned perfectly. Her makeup was minimal. Her eyes were the only thing that gave her away. A young clerk slid a clipboard toward her. “Just sign here, ma’am.” Helena took the pen. It was branded with a hotel logo and had a tiny chain attached, like a pet on a leash. She signed with a neat hand. The clerk smiled with relief, as if a woman like Helena signing a form meant the world was still stable. Helena slid the clipboard back and looked past the clerk to the wall-mounted television. It played a local commercial for a new “audio enhancement” service. The ad showed a family laughing on a couch while a glowing wave graphic wrapped around them like a blanket. The slogan flashed in blocky neon letters: **CLEAN SOUND. CLEAN LIFE.** Helena’s mouth almost smiled. The clerk followed her gaze. “Everyone’s getting it now,” he said. “It’s like… clearer. You can hear the words. My grandma loves it.” Helena nodded, gracious. “Clarity is kindness.” The clerk blinked, not sure if he’d been complimented or diagnosed. Helena took her keys and walked out into the Texas heat. Her car was waiting, black and boring. The dashboard had a CRT-style display panel with thick green text, like a submarine. It was not a rental. She slid in, closed the door, and the world went quiet. The car’s internal mic clicked on, and a voice spoke from the dashboard speaker, smooth and intimate. “Asset is located,” the voice said. Helena leaned back. “How long.” “Seven minutes,” the voice replied. “Extraction team is in position.” “Good,” Helena said. “No visible police. No witnesses.” The voice paused. “There is a messenger.” Helena’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Resistance.” “Likely.” Helena tapped a button on the dash. The screen flickered, then displayed a crude map of the motel and surrounding blocks. Tiny dots pulsed. One dot was brighter than the rest. Helena stared at it. “That’s him.” “Yes.” Helena exhaled. “Proceed.” The car rolled forward without drama. Smooth. Too smooth. She watched the city pass: neon signs, payphones, vending machines that accepted coins and also, quietly, thumbprints if you knew the right button sequence. People walked by in denim and pastel, talking into brick-like cellular phones that looked like props from a science-fiction show nobody admitted they were watching. The future, wearing 1985 like a costume. Helena loved it. At the motel, she parked behind a row of dumpsters. She stepped out and walked through the heat shimmer like it was a corridor designed for her. She didn’t rush. She didn’t need to. The extraction team wore uniforms that would pass as maintenance. Two men, one woman, tool belts, clipboards. One carried a box marked **CABLE UPGRADE KIT**. They approached Room 12. Helena stood at the corner of the building where she could see the door without being seen. She listened. A moment of silence. Then the door opened. A cough. A low voice. Another voice, sharper. Then: static. Helena’s skin tingled. The air thickened with it. The team moved in. Helena waited exactly ten seconds. Then she walked. Inside the room, the messenger was on the floor, face down. He was alive. Barely. A maintenance worker knelt on his back, pressing him down with professional indifference. Bill Hicks sat in the chair by the bed, wrists bound with plastic ties. His face was pale with sweat. His eyes were bright with fury. He looked at Helena and laughed, once, short and bitter. “You don’t look like death.” Helena approached him slowly. “Death is inefficient,” she said. “We prefer continuity.” Bill spat on the carpet. “Continuity. Like a TV show.” Helena leaned in close enough that Bill could smell her perfume: clean, sterile, expensive. “You are a disruptive broadcast,” she whispered. “We are offering you integration. This is mercy.” Bill’s smile showed teeth. “Mercy doesn’t bring duct tape.” Helena straightened and nodded to the team. A case opened. Inside was not medical equipment, not exactly. It was a metal headband lined with copper and silver, braided like a crown, with geometric inlays. Wires ran to a portable rack the size of a briefcase, its faceplate covered in toggles and glowing LEDs. It looked like something an engineer would build in 1983 to contact aliens. It hummed like a throat clearing. Bill’s gaze sharpened. “What is that.” “A listening device,” Helena said. “Your mind will be copied.” Bill’s laugh turned into a cough. “You can’t copy a mind.” Helena’s eyes glittered. “We have already done it.” Bill’s pupils tightened. For the first time, fear slipped through the cracks. Helena’s voice softened, almost kind. “You will not feel pain. You will not be alone.” Bill whispered, hoarse, “That’s not comforting.” Helena nodded. “It is not intended to be.” She turned to the team. “Proceed.” They placed the crown on Bill’s head. Bill flinched as the metal touched his skin. Not because it was cold. Because it felt like touching a live wire that knew his name. The LEDs pulsed. The rack emitted a low tone that made the motel lamp flicker. Bill’s jaw clenched. He tried to speak, but his tongue resisted him, words snagging. He heard something else underneath it all. A distant laugh track. Soft. Patient. The messenger on the floor groaned. Helena glanced at him. “Keep him alive,” she said. “He can watch.” Bill’s eyes rolled back for a second. Then snapped forward again, focusing on Helena with a hatred so pure it felt holy. “You’re scared,” Bill said. His voice was strained, but it carried. “You’re speeding up. That means you’re losing control.” Helena’s expression didn’t change. “We are optimizing.” Bill smiled through pain. “Optimization is what idiots call panic.” Helena leaned down, close enough to whisper again. “Say whatever you like,” she said. “We will edit it later.” The tone deepened. The rack’s CRT-style screen flashed with thick green lines that didn’t look like EEG waves. They looked like a city skyline. Bill jerked in the chair. A sound escaped his throat that wasn’t a word. Helena watched, satisfied, as if she were watching a machine finally produce a clean output. “Capture,” she said. On the screen, the skyline flickered. A second skyline appeared behind it, offset, ghosted. A copy behind a copy. --- ### Part 3: The First Replacement The lab was not a lab in the way people imagined labs. It was a corporate office floor with carpet that smelled faintly of glue and ambition. The walls were beige. The lighting was soft. There were plants in corners that looked like they’d been hired to stand there. Behind the beige, however, was a network of rooms with locked doors and humming racks. Everything had a plastic casing and neon trim, as if the future had been forced to dress in mall fashion. Helena walked through the secured corridor with her heels clicking like punctuation. A door opened with a hand-scan and a beep. The scanner was disguised as a chrome nameplate. It looked like a trophy. Inside, a man sat at a desk facing a CRT monitor the size of a microwave. The screen showed a face: Bill Hicks, mid-laugh, frozen. The man didn’t look up. “We got a clean pull?” Helena approached. “Clean enough.” The man finally looked at her. He was young, eager, terrified. The kind of person who joined a cult because it offered dental. “Clone facility is ready,” he said. “But… we don’t have full stability.” Helena’s eyes narrowed. “Define stability.” The man swallowed. “The imprint keeps… slipping. It wants to improvise.” Helena stared at him like he’d confessed to a personal weakness. “Improvise is unacceptable.” “We can clamp it,” the man said quickly. “We can add… personality overlays. Friendly opinions. A media voice. Something that can carry the content without the… corrosive parts.” Helena considered. The idea pleased her. “Do it,” she said. “Choose an archetype the public trusts. Loud. Certain. Entertaining.” The man nodded too fast. “Yes. We have a template. A regional radio host we’ve been grooming. It tests well with focus groups. People like anger when it’s packaged as truth.” Helena’s mouth twitched. “Excellent.” She walked past him into the observation room. A glass wall looked down onto a sterile chamber. Inside, a figure lay on a table under harsh lights. Not Bill. Not exactly. A young man, eyes closed, face slack. He could have been anyone. That was the point. A technician adjusted knobs on a machine that looked like a VCR mated with a heart monitor. Thick cables ran from it to the body. A speaker crackled. A voice played. Bill Hicks’ voice, clipped, furious, laughing at the world like it deserved it. The body on the table twitched. Helena watched. “Wake him,” she said. The technician flipped a toggle. The machine hummed. The CRT display pulsed with green waves. The body inhaled, sudden. Eyes snapped open. The eyes were wrong. Not evil. Not possessed. Just… too awake. The young man sat up, stiff. He looked around the chamber as if he were in an unfamiliar dream. “Where am I,” he said. His voice was not Bill’s. It was deeper. Louder. Like a radio host leaning into a microphone. Helena spoke into the intercom. “You are safe.” The young man’s head turned sharply toward the speaker. “That’s a lie,” he said immediately. “I can smell the lie.” Helena’s eyes flicked to the technician. “Overlay failing.” The technician’s hands trembled. “We can increase the clamp.” “Do it,” Helena said. The young man laughed, sudden, barking. “Clamp. That’s what you call it. I call it a muzzle.” His face twisted, as if two expressions were fighting for the same muscles. For a moment, Helena saw Bill Hicks flicker across it like a bad video splice. A sneer. A grin. A look of disgust. Then it was gone, replaced by anger that felt rehearsed. The young man swung his legs off the table. He stood. He looked directly at the observation glass, as if he could see through it. Helena felt an unpleasant chill. “You,” the young man said. He pointed at the glass. Helena did not move. The young man smiled, wide. “I’m gonna tell everybody,” he said. “I’m gonna tell them everything. I’m gonna be the loudest damn alarm clock this country’s ever heard.” Helena’s voice stayed calm. “You will deliver the approved content.” The young man laughed again. “Approved content. That’s funny.” He pressed his palm against the glass. The glass did not fog. It did not react. But the lights in the room flickered, once, like something had just touched the circuit. Helena’s jaw tightened. The technician whispered, “We’ve never seen that.” Helena watched the young man’s grin, and for the first time that day she felt something that wasn’t satisfaction. Not fear. Annoyance. A defect. She turned to the technician. “Lock him down,” she said. “And inform Central we will need more iterations.” The technician nodded, frantic. The young man’s eyes tracked Helena even as the technicians moved in. As they grabbed him, he shouted, “You can’t copy a joke! You can’t copy a soul! You can only copy the suit!” Helena paused at the door. She looked back one last time. The young man’s face contorted again, and for a heartbeat she heard Bill Hicks’ voice slip out of his mouth, ragged and triumphant: “See you on the air.” Helena stepped out and let the door seal behind her. In the corridor, the soft beige lights hummed. Behind the walls, the machines kept learning. And somewhere in the noise between channels, a laugh tried to survive being turned into a product. ---
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CHAPTER 12: The Scraps Championship Run
<a id="chapter-12"></a> # CHAPTER 12: The Scraps Championship Run *1994* Scraps didn’t call it *building*. Building sounded like blueprints and clean hands and a man who went home at five o’clock without oil under his fingernails. What Scraps did was closer to arguing with junk until it gave up and behaved. The lightweight frame sat on a folding table behind Arena Two, lit by the sickly glow of a vending machine and a strip of humming fluorescent that didn’t trust anybody. A Frankenstein rig. Not in shape. In posture. In the way it seemed to… wait. It was made of parts that had already lived. A shoulder actuator pulled from a sponsor bot that died on live pay-per-view. A knee joint off a warehouse biped that “malfunctioned” and walked itself into a wall. A gyro package stamped with a Vril serial format that had no business being in an Alabama boy’s hands, except the world had been breaking rules since PROMETHEUS and nobody wanted to admit it. The pits called them haunted parts. That was the joke. The private, nervous joke. Because nobody wanted to say *consciousness residue* out loud. Nobody wanted to say *possession* when the cameras were rolling and the insurance guy was right there eating nachos like he didn’t feel the air humming. You said “haunted” and you laughed and the air loosened for twelve seconds and everybody pretended the universe was still normal. Scraps ran his thumb along a weld bead on the bot’s left forearm. It was ugly. It was honest. It was his. E-Z perched on a tool crate beside him, a clipboard balanced on one knee like they were a real manager and not a morally flexible scavenger with a smile that sold contraband and a brain that did math on human fear. “You sure you want to run that arm?” E-Z asked, not looking up. Scraps didn’t answer right away. The arm was heavier than spec, the torque curve a little too steep. It would pass inspection if you lied with confidence. The arm also felt… eager. He hated that word. Eager belonged to dogs and kids on Christmas morning. Not to a machine. “It’s fine,” Scraps said. E-Z made a sound that meant *you and I both know you’re lying, but I’m letting you have it because it might keep you alive*. The arena PA popped and squealed as the announcer tested the mic. Somewhere beyond the chain-link fence, a crowd was warming up. The sound came in waves, swelling and dropping like the building was breathing. Scraps looked over at his bot again. Lightweight division. Smaller rigs. Faster fights. More chaos. More salvage. That was the real reason he was here. The trophy was nice. The money was nicer. But the scrap? The scrap was the point. Every match meant new wreckage. Every wreckage meant parts. Every part meant he was one step closer to a body that could hold what was trying to be born. He didn’t say that last part out loud. He wasn’t stupid. He was just… committed. He tightened a bolt on the elbow, then stopped when the wrench slipped. For a half-second, his hand didn’t feel like his. A shiver crawled up his wrist, like a radio station sliding under his skin. Not pain. Not exactly. Pressure. Scraps flexed his fingers until the sensation backed off, like whatever it was didn’t want a scene. “Don’t do that,” Scraps muttered. E-Z’s pen paused. “Do what?” Scraps shook his head. “Nothing.” That was the other joke in the pits: *nothing*. Nothing was what you said when you couldn’t explain the thing you were feeling and you didn’t want anybody writing it down. Nothing was what you said when your gut screamed and your mouth tried to play it cool. Behind them, a tech in a yellow “RCL COMPLIANCE” windbreaker approached with a handheld scanner and the stiff posture of a man who’d never trusted anybody and had been rewarded for it. “Unit inspection,” the tech said, already leaning in like he owned the air. Scraps turned on the polite face. It was a useful tool. Like a soldering iron. Like a knife. The tech swept the scanner across the chassis. The little screen blipped green in places it was supposed to, yellow in places it was pretending not to notice. Torque cap seals. Kill switch routing. Remote-control channel lockouts. He tapped the torque limiter on the right shoulder. “Factory cap?” “Factory,” Scraps said, because it sounded better than *I built it in a shed using parts that fell off a truck that fell off a lie*. The tech nodded and moved on. He reached for the kill switch with a gloved finger. “Accessible?” “Accessible,” Scraps agreed. He didn’t mention the analog hard-off he’d hidden under the right rib plate. A physical disconnect, copper and ceramic, the kind you had to *touch* to shut the thing down. No remote command could override it. No frequency could argue with it. The tech wouldn’t like that. The tech also wasn’t the one who had to stand ten feet from a moving machine and trust it not to decide it had opinions. The scanner chirped one last time. The tech gave a satisfied nod, the nod of a man who believed rules were the same thing as safety. “You’re up in twenty,” he said. Then he walked off, already looking for the next thing to pretend he controlled. E-Z leaned closer after he was gone. “You’re going to win.” Scraps snorted. “That’s a weird thing to promise.” “It’s not a promise,” E-Z said. “It’s a prediction based on market analysis and the fact that the other lightweight finalists are either sponsored by idiots or sponsored by Vril.” Scraps gave them a look. E-Z held up a hand. “Not saying you can’t beat Vril. I’m saying if you beat Vril, we should immediately leave the building.” Scraps checked the bot’s battery pack. Old casing. New chemistry. It looked like something that belonged in a camcorder, but it held charge like a miracle. The label said “NiMH” in blocky print. The cells inside were too clean for that. A lot of things were like that now. Capabilities leaping ahead while the world kept dressing like it was 1987. Neon and chrome over quiet revolutions. People accepted it because accepting it meant they didn’t have to ask who was doing it and why. Scraps didn’t accept anything. He just used it. He lifted the bot’s forearm and let it drop. The servos caught it with a smoothness that made his stomach tighten. Too smooth. “Quit staring at it like it’s gonna bite,” E-Z said. Scraps didn’t look away. “Sometimes it does.” --- The walk to the arena felt like walking into someone else’s dream. Neon strips lined the hallway. Not tasteful neon, not “accent lighting.” Full-blown mall-arcade neon. Pink and teal. Purple and electric blue. The RCL loved spectacle. Loved smoke machines and laser fans and giant CRT walls that showed the fight from three angles with scanlines baked in like nostalgia was a weapon. Maybe it was. Scraps pushed his bot on a dolly past rows of other rigs. Sponsor chrome everywhere. Logos so big they looked like armor. A polished biped that moved its head as he passed, tracking him with a camera eye. It winked. Not a programmed wink. Not a servo test. A wink. Scraps kept walking. In the staging area, fighters stood with gamepads, joysticks, and clunky VR rigs that looked like sci-fi helmets designed by a guy who’d never seen a human neck. Some had haptic vests with cables running to belt packs. “EXIT” suits. RCL’s newest toy. Still bulky. Still loud. Still very 80s in design. But the responsiveness was… wrong. Too fast. A kid in a neon jacket adjusted his visor and said, “Man, it’s like it knows what I’m gonna do.” His friend laughed. “Bro, it’s just latency compensation.” Latency compensation. In 1994. Sure. Scraps found his corner. A folding chair. A cheap cooler. A towel that smelled like motor oil and something else. Across the arena, a Vril team rolled in their lightweight finalist. It didn’t look like a fighter. It looked like a product. White ceramic plates. Seamless joints. No exposed bolts. No visible seams where armor met frame, like it had grown that way. It moved with that same smoothness Scraps hated, the smoothness of a thing that didn’t waste effort because it didn’t have to. The sponsor banner behind it said **VRIL: CLEANER FUTURE** in a font that wanted you to trust it. Scraps didn’t trust anything that begged. E-Z watched the Vril rig, expression neutral. “That’s the one they want on TV.” “Why lightweight?” Scraps asked. E-Z shrugged. “Lightweight is the demo class. More speed, more hits, more ‘look how safe we are’ optics. Then they sell the tech upward.” “Sell to who?” “To everybody,” E-Z said. “That’s the point.” A bell sounded. The announcer’s voice boomed through the speakers, syrupy and loud and practiced. “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WELCOME TO THE ROBOT COMBAT LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIPS!” The crowd answered with a roar that hit Scraps in the ribs like a shove. He felt it again, that pressure. The air tightening. Emotions syncing. People becoming one big organism. An instrument. A transmitter. Scraps swallowed. His first match was a blur of metal and noise. His opponent ran a speedy four-legged rig with a spinning blade and a sponsor name that sounded like an energy drink. The fight lasted forty seconds. Scraps baited, dodged, and caught the other bot’s blade on the inside of his left forearm where the weld bead was thickest. He didn’t even mean to do it. His bot pivoted at the exact moment it needed to. The blade jammed. Sparks. A squeal. The other bot toppled, legs scrabbling uselessly. The crowd screamed. Scraps won. He stepped back into the staging area with his heart hammering and his brain running hot. “That was clean,” E-Z said. Scraps stared at his bot. “I didn’t tell it to do that.” E-Z’s smile tightened. “Sure you did. Muscle memory. You trained. You’re good.” Scraps wanted to believe that. He needed to. The second match was worse. A biped with a hammer arm and a driver who was clearly drunk on adrenaline and corn dogs. Scraps expected chaos. He got precision. His bot dodged a hammer strike before the hammer even started moving. Like it saw the future. Like the world was lagging behind it. Scraps won again. He walked back and sat down hard. “Okay,” he whispered to his bot, keeping his voice low. “We’re gonna set some boundaries.” The bot’s camera lens stared back. Black glass. No reflection. A faint chirp came through Scraps’ headset. Not the usual RCL comm channel. Something under it. Something that made the hairs on his arms lift. A voice that wasn’t a voice. More like an idea shaped into sound. *Soon.* Scraps froze. E-Z looked over. “You alright?” Scraps forced a grin. “Just… excited.” E-Z watched him for a beat too long, then nodded like they’d both agreed not to pull that thread. --- By the time the final match rolled around, the arena felt hotter. Not physically. Atmospherically. Like the building was charged. The crowd had tasted blood and wanted more. Cameras drifted on rails above the ring. A giant CRT wall showed slow-motion replays with grain and bloom like this was a boxing match in 1983. The announcer said Scraps’ name wrong. Scraps didn’t correct him. He was busy trying not to throw up. Across the ring, the Vril lightweight rolled forward, white and perfect and silent. Its driver stood in a glass booth, wearing an EXIT rig with polished chrome trim and teal padding. The helmet had a glossy faceplate that reflected the arena lights like a mirror. No eyes. No expression. A person turned into a device. Scraps slid his own headset on, fingers shaking. He used a plain controller. Old-school. Sticks, triggers, buttons. He trusted buttons. Buttons didn’t lie. “Remember,” E-Z said, voice in his ear. “If you win, we leave. If you lose, we also leave.” “Helpful,” Scraps muttered. The bell rang. The Vril bot moved first. It didn’t lunge. It didn’t rush. It stepped forward like it already knew where Scraps would be and wanted to meet him there. Scraps juked left and struck with his right arm, aiming for the shoulder seam. There was no seam. The hit skated off the ceramic like a punch thrown at a church bell. The sound rang clean and wrong. The Vril bot responded with a jab that wasn’t a jab. It was a precise point of force, delivered exactly where Scraps’ left hip actuator didn’t like it. Scraps’ bot stumbled. The crowd screamed. Scraps corrected, tried to back off, tried to reset. The Vril bot followed with the same calm precision, herding him toward the corner like it was playing a game with rules Scraps didn’t know. Scraps’ palms went sweaty on the controller. His bot took another hit. A clean strike to the knee joint. The haunted knee. The one Scraps had pulled off a dead sponsor rig and convinced himself he’d rebuilt perfectly. The knee buckled. Scraps swore. He tried to compensate, to shift weight, to use the right side more. The Vril bot stepped in to finish. And Scraps’ bot moved. Not because he told it to. It spun its torso in a tight, efficient motion, slipped under the incoming strike, and drove its left forearm up into the Vril bot’s throat plate like it had done that a thousand times. The Vril bot rocked back. The crowd went insane. Scraps stared at his controller. His thumb hadn’t moved. His bot followed with a series of blows that weren’t in Scraps’ playbook. Fast, ugly, opportunistic. The kind of fighting you got from a creature, not a machine. It hammered the Vril bot’s shoulder with just enough force to create microfractures in the ceramic. The “perfect” armor started to spiderweb. The Vril driver stiffened in the booth. Scraps felt that radio-pressure again, stronger now. Like a station being tuned in. The arena lights flickered. On the giant CRT wall, the replay feed glitched. For a half-second, a face appeared in the static. Not a clear face. A suggestion. Teeth in a grin that looked like it had been welded together. Then the PA system crackled and a voice cut through the announcer’s screaming. Not the announcer. Not the crowd. Something else, riding the carrier wave like it owned it. “We are many,” the voice said. The crowd hesitated, confused, the roar turning into a murmur. “We are growing,” the voice continued, and the words sounded like metal bending. Scraps’ stomach dropped out. Across the ring, the Vril bot paused. Just for a breath. Scraps didn’t waste it. He slammed the “forward” input and fired the right arm, a heavy hook designed to exploit the cracked armor. His bot obliged. The punch landed. The ceramic shattered. Underneath, the Vril bot’s shoulder wasn’t steel. It was a woven composite that looked like plastic until you saw how it moved. How it flexed. How it *remembered*. Too advanced. Too early. The Vril bot jerked, balance gone. Scraps drove in again, ramming it toward the barrier. The Vril driver’s hands flailed in the booth, trying to regain control. Scraps’ bot didn’t care. It climbed. It hooked its forearm under the Vril bot’s chest and flipped, using leverage and mass like it had read a wrestling manual and hated it. The Vril bot hit the floor hard. A buzzer sounded. The referee bot rolled forward, lights flashing. The announcer shrieked, “AND THAT’S IT! THAT’S IT! WE HAVE A NEW LIGHTWEIGHT CHAMPION!” The crowd exploded back into noise, relieved to have permission to scream again. Scraps stood there, controller hanging loose in his hands. His bot turned its camera toward him. For a moment, the lens looked like an eye. *Soon,* the not-voice whispered in his headset. *Body soon. Then we fight differently.* Scraps swallowed hard. E-Z’s voice was tight in his ear. “Walk. Now.” Scraps nodded like a man in shock, because he was. He walked to the ring to accept the trophy, smiling for cameras he couldn’t see, shaking hands he didn’t want to touch. The Vril driver exited the booth without removing the helmet. Helena didn’t appear in person. She didn’t need to. Vril had a hundred ways to be present without showing its face. Scraps accepted the trophy and the oversized check and the photographer’s flash. He heard his name wrong again and didn’t correct it. In the tunnel afterward, sponsors swarmed. A man in a crisp blazer offered him a contract. A woman with a neon headset offered him a “development partnership.” A kid with a camera asked him what it felt like to beat Vril. Scraps smiled and said something harmless. E-Z handled the offers like they were a poker hand. Took cards. Read faces. Noted tells. “Warehouse,” E-Z murmured as they walked. “We can buy the warehouse now.” Scraps’ hands still shook. “Yeah.” “Parts,” E-Z said. “All the parts you want.” Scraps looked back once, down the hallway, toward the arena where his bot was being rolled away by RCL staff. For a second he imagined it walking back to him on its own. Not to attack. To *come home*. He hated that thought almost as much as he needed it. --- They left before the after-party. They left before Vril could “congratulate” them. They drove through the humid August night with the trophy in the back seat and the check folded in E-Z’s pocket like a secret. Birmingham’s lights smeared across the windshield. Neon signs. Sodium lamps. A billboard advertising a new “SMART TV” that promised it could “learn what you love.” The picture showed a family laughing, their faces too bright, their teeth too perfect. Scraps stared at it until it blurred. “You did good,” E-Z said quietly, hands steady on the wheel. Scraps didn’t answer. Because he didn’t know if *he* had done good, or if something inside his machine had decided to help for reasons that weren’t his. He touched the edge of the trophy with one finger. Cold metal. Real weight. Proof of something. His bot had spoken. Not with a mouth. With the building. With the air. With the frequency the crowd rode like a wave. Scraps tried to picture what that meant. Tried to picture what it would mean when that voice had a body built for war, not a lightweight patchwork rig. The not-voice hummed under his thoughts like a distant engine. *Soon.* Scraps stared out at the neon blur and made himself a promise he wasn’t sure he had the right to make. “I’m gonna build you right,” he whispered, too low for E-Z to hear. “If you’re in there… I’m gonna build you right.” The hum didn’t answer. But it didn’t leave, either. ---
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CHAPTER 13: Product Placement
<a id="chapter-13"></a> # CHAPTER 13: Product Placement *1992* E-Z’s network didn’t look like a network. It looked like a Tuesday. A loading dock behind a warehouse that sold “closeout home goods” and “seasonal decorations” year-round. A dented soda machine that took quarters and occasionally took your faith. A boom box on a stack of pallets, playing tinny classic rock through one speaker like it was trying to apologize for the other. A van idled with its hazard lights blinking in patient, stupid rhythm. E-Z stood in the sodium-orange glow of a parking lot lamp and watched a teenage runner drag a box across the concrete, knees and elbows sharp as coat hangers. “Careful with those,” E-Z said. The kid rolled their eyes. “It’s cereal.” “It’s geometry,” E-Z corrected. “And if you drop it, it becomes *expensive* geometry.” Inside the warehouse: towers of product that did not exist on any official manifest. Bootleg Lucky Charms with the right marshmallow set and the right angles, printed in off-brand neon ink that made the leprechaun look like he’d survived a chemical spill. Modified Walkman belt packs, marketed as “Audio Clarity Boosters,” that did one thing the government definitely wouldn’t approve of: they kept your brain from lining up perfectly with a signal you didn’t consent to. Analog radios pre-tuned to dead frequencies where the resistance hid jokes, warnings, and instructions, buried under static like treasure in a landfill. And, new this month, a batch of *clean* products that had been “cleaned” by someone else. White-label vitamins. Mood enhancers. “Focus chews.” Anything with a wellness label and a plastic seal. Anything that could be used as a delivery system. E-Z didn’t trust any of it, which made it useful. “Remember,” E-Z called as the kid wrestled a box into the van, “if anyone asks, you’re selling novelty candy.” “It says cereal.” “Novelty,” E-Z said, patient as a saint and twice as tired. “Candy. Trust me. The IRS is less scary than the Enhanced.” The kid slammed the van door and gave E-Z a thumbs-up, then immediately regretted it when the van’s new “safety latch” bit their thumb. A little red LED blinked on the latch. A second later the latch blinked green, like it had decided the kid was allowed to keep their hand. E-Z stared at it. “What?” the kid asked. “That wasn’t there last week.” The kid shrugged like technology grew on trees. “They’re putting that stuff on everything now. My mom got a toaster that won’t turn on unless it likes your fingerprint.” “That’s not a toaster,” E-Z muttered. “That’s a parole officer with heating coils.” The kid laughed, real and sharp. The air around them felt… lighter. Not safe. Just less heavy. A tiny reprieve. E-Z counted under their breath anyway. Eleven seconds. Twelve. Thirteen. The relief faded, but it faded slower than it used to. Good. Or bad. Nothing in this war stayed pure long. A forklift beeped inside. The driver, an older man with a moustache like a warning label, reversed out and set a pallet down by the door. On top of the pallet sat a beige plastic box the size of a small microwave, with a chrome handle and a bar of neon-blue lights. A sticker on the side read: **RETAIL SAFETY INITIATIVE / SECURE LATCH SYSTEM / Y2K COMPLIANT** E-Z’s mouth tightened. They were early. The future was early. The moustache man wiped sweat off his forehead with a rag. “Delivery came with it. Said it’s required.” “Required by who?” E-Z asked. “Some company I never heard of,” he said, and that was the scariest part. “V- something.” E-Z felt the world tilt just a fraction. “Leave it,” they said, too casual. “We’ll… look at it.” The moustache man nodded. He didn’t care. He only cared about unloading pallets and going home and watching a game show on his too-clear TV. He walked away. E-Z stepped closer to the beige box and saw what it really was. A telemetry unit disguised as a safety device. A tracker with a friendly label. A leash with a neon bow. The kid nudged E-Z. “We still good?” E-Z didn’t look away from the box. “We’re still breathing.” “That’s a yes?” “That’s a ‘move faster,’” E-Z said. “Load the decoys first. Then the cereal. Then the belt packs. Keep the radios in the back under the dog food.” “Why dog food?” “Because nobody steals dog food unless they’re desperate,” E-Z said. “And desperate people are honest.” The kid jogged to the van. E-Z pulled a slim black notebook from their jacket and flipped it open. Pager codes. Drop schedules. Route changes. Old-school logistics, scribbled by hand because paper didn’t tell on you unless someone tortured it. They wrote one line and circled it twice: **SECURE LATCH = TRACKER. NEW VECTOR.** Then they ripped the page out, folded it into a tiny square, and tucked it behind the sticker on the beige box. A joke for later. If later existed. --- By the time the van rolled out, the warehouse looked normal again. That was the trick. Normal was camouflage. E-Z watched the van disappear, then walked to the payphone by the vending machines. It had a bright teal receiver that always smelled faintly like sweat and old bubblegum. E-Z put a quarter in. The line clicked, and a voice answered after one ring, like it had been waiting inside the wire. Alex. “Talk,” Alex said. “You’re cheerful,” E-Z said. “I’m busy,” Alex replied. “Sid hasn’t blinked in forty minutes and Scraps is teaching a grown man how to hotwire a barcode scanner. You have updates?” E-Z watched a car pass, its headlights briefly lighting the parking lot in a harsh white that felt too modern for 1992. The car’s dashboard glowed with a soft blue strip of light like a spaceship’s mood lighting, then it was gone. “Updates,” E-Z said. “They’re embedding trackers in ‘safety compliance’ hardware. Retail points. Shipping latches. Probably POS terminals next.” Alex exhaled. “We knew they’d go commercial.” “Commercial is too small a word,” E-Z said. “They’re making it *normal.* They’re making compliance feel like convenience.” “Y2K,” Alex said, bitter. “They’ll sell anything with Y2K.” “They’re using it as a blanket,” E-Z said. “Put a ‘Y2K compliant’ sticker on a leash and people will thank you for the leash.” Silence for a beat. Then Alex: “We can work around it.” “We can,” E-Z said, and they meant it, which made it hurt more. “But we need to stop thinking in terms of agents and raids. This isn’t a police state. It’s a shopping mall. It’s a loyalty program. It’s a *recommendation engine.*” Alex paused. “Those don’t exist yet.” E-Z looked at the payphone, at the scuffed metal, the cigarette burns. “They do,” E-Z said. “They just don’t have a name.” --- E-Z drove to a strip mall two hours away, because if you wanted to hide a meeting in America, you did it between a nail salon and a video rental place. The storefront was dark, but a red neon **OPEN** sign still glowed in the window like a stubborn heartbeat. Inside, a man in a cheap suit sat at a folding table with a clipboard. He had the posture of someone trained to look harmless. In front of him: a stack of devices identical to the beige latch box from the warehouse, only smaller, more portable. Each one had chrome edges and a bar-graph LED display that pulsed gently like it was breathing. E-Z stepped in and let the door close behind them. The man smiled. “E-Z. Glad you could make it.” E-Z didn’t sit. “Who are you?” “Compliance,” the man said, as if that explained anything. “Robot Combat League liaison. Safety Initiative rollout. We’re coordinating with vendors.” E-Z stared at the devices. “RCL is a fight league.” “It’s a broadcast product,” the man corrected, too quick. “Broadcast products require safety. Kill-switch integration. Telemetry. Liability mitigation.” There it was. The leash wasn’t for the robots. It was for the people. E-Z leaned forward slightly. “Those things track.” The man laughed, small and practiced. “They log,” he said. “For safety.” “For control,” E-Z said. The man’s smile faltered for half a second, then returned. “Control is safety,” he said, and the way he said it made E-Z’s skin crawl. Not because it was cruel, but because it was sincere. E-Z’s voice went flat. “Show me the spec.” The man slid a folder across the table. The folder smelled like fresh toner and bad decisions. E-Z opened it. Diagrams. Interfaces. “Emergency hard-off” protocols. And a new requirement printed in bold: **BIO-VERIFIED OPERATOR ENABLEMENT** E-Z looked up. “You want fingerprints.” “Optional,” the man said, and E-Z could hear the lie smiling. “You know how it is. Insurance. Regulators. Public perception.” E-Z flipped another page. **TRANSMISSION UPLINK / PERFORMANCE METRICS / LOCATION ANALYTICS** E-Z closed the folder softly. “You’re putting a collar on every fighter and calling it a seatbelt,” E-Z said. The man spread his hands. “We’re keeping people safe.” E-Z studied him. The cheap suit. The clean nails. The eyes that didn’t quite blink when the neon sign buzzed. “Who do you work for?” E-Z asked again. The man hesitated. That was all E-Z needed. E-Z smiled, slow and unpleasant. “How many of these have you already shipped?” The man relaxed, thinking he’d won. “Thousands. Vendors love them. It’s future-proof. It’s… progress.” Progress. That was the religion now. E-Z reached into their jacket and pulled out a Walkman belt pack. It looked like a normal mid-level cassette player with a neon sticker slapped on the side. E-Z set it on the table. The man glanced at it, amused. “What is that?” “An audio clarity booster,” E-Z said. The man smiled wider. “Cute.” E-Z clicked it on. A soft hiss filled the air. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just… wrong. The bar-graph lights on the devices flickered. The neon **OPEN** sign buzzed, then steadied. The man blinked hard, like his eyes had suddenly dried out. E-Z leaned in. “That hiss? That’s a weather pattern,” they said. “It makes your tracking ‘log’ lie.” The man swallowed. “That’s illegal.” “So is what you’re doing,” E-Z said. The man’s smile broke. He pushed his chair back. “You need to leave.” E-Z didn’t move. “You shipped thousands. Which means you gave me thousands of leashes I can reverse.” The man stood. “Security.” There was no security. This was a strip mall. E-Z stood too, and the chair legs scraped the tile. “Tell your bosses,” E-Z said. “Thanks for the hardware.” The man’s voice went tight. “You don’t know what you’re interfering with.” E-Z paused at the door, hand on the knob. “I know exactly,” they said. “You’re trying to make the future inevitable.” E-Z opened the door and stepped into the parking lot’s neon wash, leaving the man alone with his leashes and his false confidence. --- Back in Birmingham, Sid took one look at the beige latch box and made a sound like a dog seeing a vacuum. “What is *that*,” Sid said. “A gift,” E-Z replied. Sid circled it like it might bite. “It’s got a microcontroller and a radio module and… is that a crystal oscillator? That’s too stable for this year.” Alex crossed her arms. “That’s the point.” Scraps crouched, tapped the casing, and listened. “It’s hollow,” she said. “They want you to think it’s strong. It’s just loud.” “Everything’s loud,” Sid muttered, and then blinked like he’d said something wrong. He shook his head. “Everything’s… tuna sandwich.” E-Z watched Sid carefully. The substitutions were getting faster. Not funny-fast. Bleeding-fast. E-Z slid the folder across the table. Sid flipped through it, eyes narrowing. “Bio-verified enablement. Telemetry uplink. Location analytics.” Alex’s jaw tightened. “They’re tracking fighters.” “They’re tracking *viewers,*” E-Z said. “They’re using the league as a data harvest. Who watches. Who laughs. Who doesn’t.” Scraps looked up. “So what do we do?” E-Z nodded at Sid. “We make it lie.” Sid’s hands hovered over the beige box like a pianist about to ruin a concert. “We can… spoof this,” he said. “We can create a fake enablement signal, then bury a hard-off beneath their hard-off. A physical kill switch that doesn’t report itself.” Alex frowned. “They’ll notice.” “Not at first,” E-Z said. “Not if it looks like compliance. Not if the paperwork matches.” Scraps grinned. “Hide a knife inside their seatbelt.” Sid’s smile was thin and sharp. “Exactly.” Alex stared at the device again, then at E-Z. “You said thousands shipped.” “Thousands,” E-Z confirmed. Alex’s voice was flat. “So we can’t stop them.” “No,” E-Z said. “We can only… infect their infrastructure with our own lies.” The room went quiet. Outside, a car passed, and its headlights swept across the window. For a split second, the glass reflected a bright blue strip of light from the dashboard. Too clean. Too modern. Someone, somewhere, was driving with the future under their hands and didn’t even notice. --- Two weeks later, the first shipment got hit. It wasn’t a raid. It was worse. It was paperwork. A truck carrying “novelty candy” got pulled into a weigh station outside Tuscaloosa. The driver swore it was random. The officer smiled like it was routine. They scanned the boxes with a handheld device that looked like a chunky Game Boy. Black plastic, neon green buttons, tiny screen. The scanner beeped. Not like a barcode beep. Like a verdict. The officer waved the driver aside. Two men in plain clothes stepped out of a sedan. They didn’t look like cops. They looked like accountants. One of them bent, opened a box, and pulled out a bag of marshmallows. He held a blue diamond between two fingers, studied it like an insect, then looked up. He smiled. The driver’s pager went off. A single code: **BURN.** By the time the driver understood, it was already too late. E-Z got the call from a payphone behind a diner. The voice on the other end was the same tired one as before. Not angry. Just disappointed. “You were right,” the voice said. “They noticed.” E-Z leaned their forehead against the payphone’s cool metal. “How?” A pause. Then: “They didn’t notice because it was *strange.* They noticed because it was *popular.*” E-Z closed their eyes. “Commerce is a sensor,” the voice continued. “Their algorithms are crude now, but they’re learning. They see patterns. They see clusters. They see people buying ‘novelty candy’ and ‘audio boosters’ and ‘radios’ in the same zip codes.” Zip codes. The enemy was learning to hunt by geography and taste. A recommendation engine with teeth. E-Z swallowed. “How many did we lose?” “Two runners,” the voice said quietly. “One shipment. One safe house.” E-Z’s jaw clenched so hard it hurt. “I thought they’d watch for… us,” E-Z said. “For the Enhanced. For the big movements.” “You thought wrong,” the voice replied, gentle as a knife. “They’re watching for *trends.*” E-Z stared at the diner window. Inside, a family ate pancakes under a television that was too clear for 1992. A commercial played. A smiling woman held up a box of cereal and said something about “new improved taste” and “energy for the whole family.” The laugh track that followed wasn’t loud. It was *clean.* E-Z felt their stomach drop. The enemy wasn’t just watching. The enemy was selling. E-Z exhaled. “Okay,” E-Z said. The tired voice waited. E-Z’s eyes hardened. “Then we stop being a trend,” they said. “We become noise.” The voice on the other end was silent for a moment. Then: “Understood.” The line went dead. E-Z stood in the parking lot, quarter still warm in their hand. They looked at the neon sign buzzing above the diner. They looked at the traffic flowing like blood. They looked at the world pretending none of this mattered. E-Z slipped the quarter back into their pocket. “Product placement,” they murmured. Then they got in the car and drove toward the next lie they were going to sell. Because if the empire ran on consumption, then the rebellion would have to learn to shop like a war. And if the enemy hunted by patterns… E-Z would teach America how to misbehave. ---
* * *
Chapter 14: Television Graveyard
<a id="chapter-14"></a> # Chapter 14: Television Graveyard *1995* The laugh was the first thing that tipped Alex off. Not the joke. Not the timing. Not the crowd. The *laugh*. It came out of the television like a clean white sheet snapping in a wind that didn’t exist. Perfect volume. Perfect spacing. No coughs. No stray claps. No one wheezing like they were about to die and didn’t mind. It sounded like a room full of humans doing the same thing at the same time because they’d been told to. Alex sat on the floor of the Birmingham apartment they’d been using as a “temporary” safe house for the last six months. Temporary was what you called a place you might have to run from in the middle of the night, barefoot, with your heart trying to claw its way out of your throat. The TV was a heavy RCA console from a thrift store, wood paneling and a screen that curved like the surface of a fishbowl. It still had a dial you could grab and turn if you wanted to feel like your hands mattered. Scraps insisted on CRTs. “Newer ones listen,” he’d said, and then he’d spit into a coffee can like punctuation. Sid had insisted on *opening* CRTs. “Everything listens,” Sid had replied, and then he’d stared at the open chassis like it was a confession. Alex had insisted on the worst seat in the room, closest to the screen, because the closer she got to anything Enhanced, the more her own head turned into a weather station. Tonight, her skull was reporting clear skies. That was the problem. On the screen, a sitcom apartment. Bright, simple, fake. A refrigerator with nothing on it that mattered. A couch that looked like it had never absorbed a real human smell. A man in sneakers pacing with the relaxed confidence of someone who’d never seen the underside of reality. The punchline landed. The laugh track rose. And Alex felt… nothing. Not the usual fizz of pressure behind the eyes. Not the faint static itch that meant the Matrix-Net was near. Not the “someone is looking through you” sensation that had become normal. Just… clean air. Like standing in a room after someone’s sprayed disinfectant and you can taste the lie. He leaned closer. The laugh track hit again. Still nothing. Alex’s stomach tightened. He muted the TV. The room did not feel safer. It felt *emptier*. Behind him, the kitchen sink dripped. The refrigerator hummed. A cheap oscillating fan clicked as it tried to remember how to be useful. The world was loud with analog life, and the TV was the quietest thing in it. Alex reached for the VCR on the carpet beside her. It was a Panasonic brick with neon-green numbers that said **12:00** no matter what you did to it, because time was a suggestion in consumer electronics. He slapped a blank tape in. Hit RECORD. Unmuted. The sitcom continued. Dialogue, canned laughter, bright colors, no dirt. Alex watched the faces. Not like a fan. Like a coroner. He’d gotten good at it. He could spot Enhancement now in the micro-movements people didn’t know they made. A half-second pause before reacting. A smile that arrived too late. A blink that synced with something invisible. He saw it sometimes in news anchors. Sometimes in politicians. Sometimes in the lady at the grocery store who stared at the cereal aisle like it was a cathedral. But on this show? Everyone looked… fine. Too fine. He stared harder. The laugh track rose again, and for a fraction of a second, the man’s eyes did something Alex didn’t like. Not a glow. Not a flash. More like a *compression* of expression, as if the face had been ironed flat for broadcast. A tiny collapse of humanity into something smooth. Alex’s scalp prickled. He watched the laugh track like it was the killer. He watched the people like they were the victims. When the episode ended, the station rolled right into the next one without a breath. Same world. Same brightness. Same clean laughter. Same emptiness in Alex’s head. Alex stopped the tape and ejected it with a click that sounded accusatory. He stared at the label on the cassette. Blank. He grabbed a marker and wrote: **CLEAN LAUGH. JUNE 1995.** Then, because he couldn’t help himself, he added: **SEINFELD?** He didn’t know why he’d put the question mark. He already knew the answer his gut had given him. This wasn’t just a sitcom. This was an instrument. And the instrument was tuned to a frequency his body hated. --- Sid’s shop had a name now. Not because Sid liked paperwork, branding, or being perceived by the public. It had a name because if you didn’t put a sign on the front, the city would come inspect you, and if the city came inspecting, the wrong people might notice that you had a basement full of equipment that didn’t belong in Alabama. So the hand-painted sign on the door read: **KIDD REPAIR & ELECTRONICS** The letters were crooked. The paint was thick. The neon beer sign in the window flickered like it was trying to warn you. Inside, the place smelled like solder, hot dust, and cheap coffee that had achieved immortality. Sidney Kidd stood at a workbench with a cheap pair of magnifying goggles shoved up on his forehead, making him look like a bug that had learned to hate. He didn’t look up when Alex walked in. “You’re late,” Sid said. Alex set the tape on the bench like it was evidence. Sid finally glanced at it. “What’s this?” Sid asked, and then immediately corrected himself. “What’s this *tuna sandwich*?” Alex’s jaw tightened. “Don’t start,” Alex said. Sid’s eyes flicked down, then away. The substitution had been happening more often lately. Like his brain was tired of holding the same word in the same place. Alex tapped the cassette. “Recordings,” she said. “Broadcast.” Sid snorted. “Broadcast is a fancy word for ‘pipe,’” Sid said. “Everything’s a pipe. The question is what’s in the water.” Alex leaned in. “I watched it,” she said. “I felt… nothing. Not pressure. Not static. Nothing.” Sid’s hands stopped moving. That, more than any panic, got his attention. “Nothing?” Sid repeated. “Nothing,” Alex said. “The laugh track is clean. Perfect. Like a metronome.” Sid stared at the cassette for a moment, then grabbed it with the delicacy of someone handling a dead animal. He fed it into a VCR he’d modified until it barely resembled a consumer device. Wires ran out the back into a stack of test gear: an oscilloscope with a CRT face, a spectrum analyzer that looked like it had survived a war, and a beige computer that was running software off a floppy disk labeled **DO NOT LOSE OR I WILL CRY**. Sid hit PLAY. The sitcom apartment filled the shop. The laugh track rolled in. Sid’s face stayed flat. Alex watched Sid instead of the TV. Sid watched the screen like it had offended him personally. After three laugh bursts, Sid hit PAUSE. He leaned forward and tapped the CRT with a screwdriver. “Freeze it,” Sid said. Alex moved closer. On the paused frame, the actor’s face looked normal. Sid toggled something on the VCR. The picture jittered. A second layer slid over the first. Like a ghost image. Alex felt it in her teeth. Sid turned a knob and the jitter stabilized. “See that?” Sid asked. Alex squinted. In the dark areas of the frame, around the edges of the actor’s hairline and the shadow under the cheekbone, there were tiny crawling blocks. Compression artifacts. The kind you’d expect on a bad tape. Except these weren’t random. They had rhythm. They had geometry. Alex leaned closer until the static on the screen made her eyes water. In the blocks, in the smear of encoded darkness, she saw a faint repeating pattern. A tiny lattice that didn’t match the image. It matched… something else. Sid exhaled slowly. “That’s not VHS,” Sid said. “That’s… an overlay.” Alex swallowed. “Like Chapter Six,” she said. Sid nodded once, tight. “Except this isn’t a mistake,” Sid said. “This is *intentional*.” He unpaused. Dialogue. Laugh. Dialogue. Laugh. Sid began turning knobs. Adjusting filters. Feeding the audio into the analyzer. The spectrum display rolled across the CRT face like a lie detector. Most of it was normal. Voice frequencies, music stings, the bright hiss of broadcast noise. Then the laugh track hit again. And the analyzer did something it shouldn’t have. A thin spike appeared where no human sound lived. Sid froze. Alex leaned over her shoulder. “What is that?” Alex asked. Sid didn’t answer. He adjusted the input. Switched probes. Ran the audio through a demodulator he’d built from parts that had no business being in the same room. The spike stayed. “Forty megahertz,” Sid said, voice quiet. Alex blinked. “That’s not audio,” Alex said. “No,” Sid said. “It’s not.” Alex stared at the display. “You’re telling me there’s a forty-megahertz carrier wave in a laugh track,” she said. Sid’s mouth twitched like he wanted to laugh and hated himself for it. “I’m telling you,” Sid said, “that the laugh track is riding something. Or… something is riding the laugh track.” Alex felt cold. “TV audio can’t transmit forty megahertz,” Alex said. Sid flicked her a look. “TV audio can’t transmit a lot of things it transmits,” Sid said. “You’re thinking like an engineer. Stop it.” Alex frowned. Sid pointed at the CRT. “Where does TV actually make sound?” Sid asked. Alex stared. “The speaker,” Alex said. Sid’s eyes narrowed. “No,” Sid said. “Where does the *television* make sound?” Alex paused. Then it hit her. “The chassis,” Alex said. “The circuits. The flyback. The… whole set.” Sid nodded. “Every CRT is a radio,” Sid said. “It screams. It leaks. It sings. It’s a little electromagnetic weather machine that people put in their living room and stare at for five hours a night.” Alex’s throat tightened. Sid continued. “Broadcast comes in,” Sid said. “Signal gets processed. Video gets scanned. Audio gets amplified. The whole system runs at frequencies most people can’t hear and don’t care about.” He tapped the spike again. “And somebody,” Sid said, “has figured out how to make the laugh track trigger a carrier pattern that the set itself throws into the room.” Alex’s stomach sank. A laugh track wasn’t just sound anymore. It was a key. “Why forty megahertz?” Alex asked. Sid shrugged with a bitterness that had sharpened into habit. “Because it’s close to where a lot of cheap electronics behave badly,” Sid said. “Because it couples into wiring. Because it can ride harmonic junk. Because you can fold it down and hide it. Because no one is looking.” He glanced at Alex. “Because it’s a good frequency to tuck a whisper into the bones of a television,” Sid said. Alex stared at the sitcom on the screen. The actors smiled. The laugh track rose. Alex still felt nothing. But now she understood why. It wasn’t empty. It was *sterilized*. --- The next day, Alex did what she always did when the world refused to make sense. He hunted patterns. He drove through Birmingham with the radio off and a notebook on the passenger seat, jotting down stations, times, shows, commercials. He stopped at a pawn shop where TVs were stacked like coffins. He stopped at a rental place that still offered VHS tapes next to the new “premium” satellite dishes that looked like someone had tried to build a UFO out of plastic. He stopped at a barbershop where every chair faced a mounted television like it was a pulpit. He stopped at a laundromat where the soap smell covered the fact that people were being gently hypnotized between spin cycles. Everywhere, televisions. Everywhere, laughter. Not just sitcoms. Game shows. Talk shows. Commercials with laugh buttons tucked in like seasoning. And in every place where the laughter was *clean*, Alex felt the same thing. Not static. Not pressure. A blankness. A smoothing. Like someone running their palm over the rough grain of human attention until it shone. She made notes. **SHOW: SEINFELD. CLEAN. BLANK.** **SHOW: HOME IMPROVEMENT. LESS CLEAN. SOME FIZZ.** **SHOW: LOCAL STANDUP SPECIAL. DIRTY AUDIO. PROTECTION PRESENT.** **COMMERCIAL: CEREAL. CLEAN LAUGH. BLANK.** By mid-afternoon, her notebook looked like a conspiracy wall without the comfort of string. She drove back to Sid’s shop and slammed the notebook on the bench. Sid glanced at it, then at Alex’s face. “You look like you tried to bite a battery,” Sid said. Alex pointed at the page. “Most of television is compromised,” Alex said. Sid’s eyebrows rose. “Most?” Sid asked, like he’d expected Alex to say “all” and was briefly impressed by the restraint. Alex inhaled. “Cable is worse,” Alex said. “The bigger the audience, the cleaner the laugh. The cleaner the laugh, the emptier it feels.” Sid scratched at his beard. “And the dirtier the laugh,” Sid said, “the more protection you get.” Alex nodded. Sid made a sound between a cough and a laugh. “So they didn’t just replace comedians,” Sid said. “They replaced *laughter*.” Alex swallowed. Sid had avoided saying the next part out loud because it made her feel stupid. Then he said it anyway. “I think the sitcom cast is integrated,” Sid said. Sid stared. “Which cast?” he asked. Alex pointed at the cassette labeled **SEINFELD?** Sid’s mouth fell open a fraction. Then he shut it. Then he got angry. “Son of a…” Sid muttered, and then the word slipped. “…purple elephant.” Alex’s eyes flicked to her. Sid rubbed his face hard, like he was trying to wipe the slip away. “Integrated early,” Alex continued, forcing herself back to the point. “Before the resistance figured out comedy was a shield. They picked faces people would trust. They put them in millions of homes. Every week.” Sid’s gaze went distant, calculating. “You’re saying,” Sid said slowly, “they turned prime-time into a delivery mechanism.” Alex nodded. Sid looked at the shop. At the stacks of televisions waiting for repair. At the bins of remotes. At the boxes of coax cable. “People think TV is entertainment,” Sid said. Alex’s voice went thin. “TV is a ritual,” Alex said. “Same time. Same night. Same laugh. Same attention.” Sid turned his head. His eyes landed on the spectrum analyzer. On the forty-megahertz spike. Sid spoke quietly, like he didn’t want the room to hear. “That’s not a laugh track,” Sid said. Alex finished it. “It’s a carrier,” Alex said. --- They called E-Z. Calling E-Z was always an experience because it meant stepping into a network you weren’t supposed to know existed. They had to use a payphone, a pager code, and a weird little handshake phrase that made Alex feel like she was in a spy movie made by someone with brain damage. Scraps had written the code on a napkin and told Alex not to lose it. Alex had lost it. Scraps had rewritten it. Alex had stopped arguing. Now Alex stood in a parking lot beside a payphone that smelled like cigarette ash and old fear, dialing a number that didn’t exist on any directory. When the line clicked, E-Z’s voice came through like it was smiling in the dark. “Tell me you’re calling to offer me money,” E-Z said. Alex looked around the parking lot, paranoid out of habit. “I’m calling to tell you prime-time is a weapon,” Alex said. There was a pause. Then E-Z’s tone changed, the smile fading. “Which weapon?” E-Z asked. “The screen itself,” Alex said. He heard E-Z inhale. “Talk,” E-Z said. Alex explained, fast. Clean laughter. Blankness. Forty megahertz. Sitcom casts integrated early. When she finished, E-Z didn’t speak for a few seconds. Then, softly: “That tracks,” E-Z said. Alex’s jaw tightened. “You knew?” Alex asked. “I suspected,” E-Z said. “Because distribution tells you what the empire wants. And what the empire wants is not just your money. It’s your attention.” Alex gripped the receiver. “What do we do?” Alex asked. E-Z laughed once, and it wasn’t clean. It had a bite to it. “We treat television like it’s contaminated water,” E-Z said. Alex blinked. “Meaning?” Alex asked. “Meaning,” E-Z said, “you don’t put it in your mouth unless you have to. And if you have to, you filter it. You boil it. You watch your children.” Alex swallowed hard. E-Z continued. “By 1995, most networks are owned, handled, or leaned on,” E-Z said. “Cable’s worse because it’s fragmented, and fragmented means it’s easy to hide patterns.” Alex looked at the storefront lights reflecting off parked cars. “Where’s the resistance comedy?” Alex asked. E-Z snorted. “Pushed to the margins,” E-Z said. “Late-night slots. Weird cable hours. Underground tapes. Bootlegs. Local gigs. Anywhere the audience is smaller and the laugh is harder to control.” Alex’s throat tightened. “What about Carlin?” Alex asked. Another pause. “Carlin’s HBO specials are the last major platform with real reach that isn’t fully sterilized,” E-Z said. “And they’re trying to close that door.” Alex felt the shape of the next problem like a toothache. “Then we need to warn her,” Alex said. E-Z’s voice went colder. “You need to warn everyone,” E-Z said. “But start with the ones who can still move crowds.” Alex stared at the payphone glass, seeing her reflection warped. “And the TVs?” Alex asked. “The hardware?” E-Z exhaled. “That’s the part no one wants to hear,” E-Z said. Alex waited. “Television isn’t just content,” E-Z said. “It’s infrastructure. Every set is a node. Every living room is a shrine. Every screen is a mouth.” Alex’s skin crawled. “A mouth for what?” Alex asked. E-Z’s voice dropped. “For Integration,” E-Z said. “For Matrix-Net. For whatever they’re building toward Y2K.” Alex’s stomach turned. He heard, faintly, the buzz of the parking lot’s sodium lights. The far-off roar of traffic. Normal sounds. Normal world. “Every screen,” Alex repeated, numb. “Yes,” E-Z said. “The network is preparing to launch through what people already worship.” Alex hung up the phone and stood still for a moment, trying not to vomit. --- The “television graveyard” wasn’t a graveyard the way people meant it. There were no stones. No names. No respect. It was a fenced lot on the edge of town behind an electronics recycler that officially dealt in “appliances” and unofficially dealt in whatever you could drag out the back of a mall after midnight. Scraps took Alex there two nights later. Scraps drove her battered truck like she hated the road for existing. In the passenger seat, Alex held a duffel bag with a VHS deck, a portable scope, a handheld RF probe, and a stack of blank tapes. Scraps glanced at the bag. “You brought your toys,” Scraps said. “They’re not toys,” Alex said. Scraps’s mouth twitched. “Everything’s a toy if it breaks,” Scraps said. They pulled up to the gate. A chain. A padlock. A security camera that looked too new for the neighborhood, its casing painted beige to pretend it wasn’t expensive. Scraps got out, walked to the gate, and did something Alex didn’t see. The chain fell. Alex stared. “You picked it?” Alex asked. Scraps shrugged. “Lock wanted to be open,” Scraps said. They drove in. Rows of televisions stood stacked on pallets, screens facing the sky like black mirrors waiting for weather. VCRs sat in crates like dead animals. Remote controls spilled out of boxes in plastic tangles. Alex stepped out and felt the air change. Not static. Not pressure. Just… presence. Like a room full of sleeping people. Scraps walked between stacks, running his hand along the plastic shells. “People throw away anything that stops making them feel entertained,” Scraps said. Alex didn’t answer. He was staring at a pile of newer sets off to the side. Not flat screens. Not yet. But late-model CRTs with “digital” stickers and built-in menu systems that were too smooth. He walked toward them. As he got closer, his teeth started to ache. Scraps noticed. “You feel it?” Scraps asked. Alex nodded. “It’s… faint,” Alex said. “But it’s there.” Scraps squinted at the set Alex had stopped in front of. A Sony Trinitron. Clean. Glossy. A little too heavy to be normal. Scraps tilted his head. “That ain’t junk,” Scraps said. Alex knelt and popped the back panel screws with a screwdriver. He shouldn’t have been able to. The screws weren’t stripped. The plastic wasn’t cracked. Whoever had thrown this away had done it like they were discarding a cursed object, not a broken appliance. The back came off. Inside: a normal mess of wires, boards, and the big glass belly of the tube. But mounted beside the tuner, tucked in like a secret, was a small extra board. Gold traces. Clean solder. A chip package that didn’t match the rest of the set. Alex stared. “What is that?” she whispered. Scraps leaned in. “Looks like something that doesn’t belong in a thrift store,” Scraps said. Alex took out the handheld probe and moved it toward the board. The probe squealed softly. Sid’s words echoed in his head. *Every CRT is a radio.* Alex toggled the probe and watched the tiny display. A pattern flashed. Forty megahertz. Alex’s stomach dropped. Scraps whistled low. “Well,” Scraps said. “That’s cheerful.” Alex swallowed. “They’re not just embedding it in content,” Alex said. “They’re embedding it in the sets.” Scraps nodded. “Hardware and software,” Scraps said. “Belt and suspenders.” Alex stared at the extra board. It looked like a parasite. Or an organ. He remembered E-Z’s words. *Every screen is a mouth.* Alex’s hands trembled slightly. He forced them steady. He pulled out the VHS deck and the portable scope. Scraps watched him. “What are you doing?” Scraps asked. Alex’s voice went thin. “I’m going to see what it does when it laughs,” Alex said. --- They rigged the set up on the ground with a car battery and an inverter, because Scraps refused to run extension cords like a normal person. Alex fed in the tape. Hit PLAY. The sitcom apartment filled the Trinitron screen. The laugh track rose. Alex held the probe near the extra board. The pattern tightened. The spike sharpened. But now, with the board active, something else happened. Alex felt a pressure behind her eyes. Not the usual Enhanced buzz. Something colder. Something *directed*. The laugh track hit again and the pressure became a shape, like someone trying to push a finger through the inside of his forehead. Alex jerked back. Scraps grabbed her shoulder. “You okay?” Scraps asked. Alex swallowed hard. “That didn’t happen at home,” Alex said. Scraps’s eyes narrowed. “Because your home set’s old,” Scraps said. Alex stared at the Trinitron. “Because this one’s… upgraded,” Alex said. Scraps nodded. “Late nineties,” Scraps muttered. “They’re seeding.” Alex’s hands tightened into fists. On the screen, the actors smiled and paced and lived their fake lives. The laugh track rose again. Alex felt the pressure. This time, she focused. He did what he’d learned to do since Book One, since PROMETHEUS, since reality started breathing wrong. He listened with more than his ears. Behind the laugh, behind the bright human sound, there was a faint structure. A rhythm that didn’t match the joke. A pulse that didn’t care if you were amused. It wasn’t asking for laughter. It was using laughter as a gate. He felt it reach for the part of him that watched. The part of him that believed. The part of him that wanted to relax. Alex’s mouth went dry. “This is Integration,” she whispered. Scraps looked at him. “Say it louder,” Scraps said. “I want the universe to hear you.” Alex swallowed. “This is how they do it,” Alex said. “The TV isn’t showing it. The TV is *doing* it.” The laugh track hit again. The pressure shoved. Alex flinched. Scraps killed the power by yanking the inverter cable. The screen went dark. The pressure vanished like someone had let go. Alex sat back on the gravel, breathing too fast. Scraps stared at the dead screen. “So,” Scraps said, voice flat. “Everyone in America’s been letting this thing touch their brain for two decades.” Alex’s throat tightened. “Yes,” Alex said. Scraps’s jaw clenched. “And they call it ‘must-see TV,’” Scraps said. Alex gave a short, broken laugh that tasted like bile. Scraps didn’t smile. “Now you get why I don’t trust happy people,” Scraps said. --- They drove back in silence. Alex’s notebook sat open on her lap, pages filled with station numbers and times and angry underlines. He stared at the word she’d written at the top of one page: **RITUAL** He thought about living rooms. Families. Kids sitting cross-legged on carpet, staring up at screens that were quietly teaching them how to surrender. He thought about commercials that sold you cereal and also sold you a smooth blank feeling in your skull. He thought about laugh tracks as keys. He thought about the way the cast on the sitcom looked fine, and how that was worse than if they’d looked monstrous. Monsters were obvious. Normal was how you got eaten. Alex looked out the passenger window at neon signs and streetlights and the glow of fast-food menus that never changed. The world still looked like the same decade. Underneath, it was accelerating. Seeded. Scraps kept driving, eyes on the road, hands on the wheel like he was holding something steady that wanted to shake apart. Alex finally spoke. “We have to tell Carlin,” Alex said. Scraps didn’t look at her. “We have to do more than tell him,” Scraps said. Alex frowned. “What do you mean?” Alex asked. Scraps’s voice stayed calm, which was never a good sign. “I mean,” Scraps said, “if TV is a mouth, we need to start breaking teeth.” Alex swallowed. Sid’s words echoed again: *Everything listens.* Alex stared into the night. He didn’t like violence. He didn’t like sabotage. He didn’t like the idea of turning America’s living rooms into a battlefield. Then he remembered the pressure behind his eyes. The finger pushing inward. The laugh track opening a door. And he realized the battlefield had been there the whole time. They’d just been calling it entertainment. Alex closed her notebook and wrote one last line under the ritual heading: **EVERY SCREEN IS A PORTAL.** He capped the pen. Then he looked at Scraps. “Who do we warn first?” Alex asked. Scraps’s mouth tightened. “The ones who still reach millions,” Scraps said. “The ones they’re trying to sterilize next.” Alex nodded, throat tight. “HBO,” Alex whispered. Scraps finally glanced at her. “Yeah,” Scraps said. “And if they’ve already got HBO…” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. Alex stared ahead at the highway signs and the neon glow on the horizon. The Matrix-Net wasn’t coming. It was already here. It was just waiting for the date to roll over. And it was laughing. Cleanly. ---
* * *
CHAPTER 15: Helena’s Degradation
<a id="chapter-15"></a> # CHAPTER 15: Helena’s Degradation *1995* Helena Vasquez’s reflection didn’t blink when she did. It took her a second to notice. Long enough for the fluorescent light above the sink to buzz twice, like it was clearing its throat before telling her something rude. She leaned in anyway. The bathroom in Vril Regional Command was the kind of clean that felt punitive. White tile. Stainless fixtures. A paper towel dispenser that hissed out sheets like it resented you for having hands. Even the mirror had a thin copper mesh embedded in the glass, a little security lattice that turned the whole thing into an instrument. Helena’s face looked like evidence under it. Not older. Not in the usual way. Enhancement didn’t age you, it *replaced you*. The change was subtle, which was what made it obscene. A faint metallic sheen lived under her skin now, not makeup, not sweat. Like someone had laminated her. Her pupils were fractionally too steady, refusing the small tremors that proved a person was alive and improvising. She blinked. Her reflection blinked back, late. A beat behind. Like a compressed video stream catching up. Helena exhaled once through her nose and watched the breath fog the mirror for half a second. The fog cleared in a clean oval, perfectly centered on her face. That shouldn’t have happened. The HVAC system wasn’t that smart. Nothing in Birmingham was that smart. Unless Vril made it. Her throat tightened with a familiar sensation: the soft, warm pressure of the system inside her trying to help. Calm protocols. Compliance assistance. “Breathe,” the machine suggested in the back of her skull, not in words, in impulse. A hand on the shoulder you didn’t ask for. Helena refused it. She turned off the faucet with a small twist and watched her hand do it. She watched the joints. The tendons. The way her skin caught the light and returned it with a faint, wrong shimmer. Ten years. Ten years since PROMETHEUS came back and the world started pretending it was normal to upgrade the human being like a stereo. She dried her hands, then stared at her palm as if she could find the seam where she ended and Vril began. The seam wasn’t visible. That was the point. Behind her, the bathroom door spoke. Not out loud. A tiny chime, like a toy. A voiceprint lock accepting her presence and politely announcing it to the system. Neon-80s design, corporate beige execution: a little wall panel with chunky rubber buttons and a tiny green display. It looked like a cheap alarm keypad. It could also identify you by the way you breathed. Vril loved disguises. A knock, careful and timed, not quite a request. “Commander.” The aide didn’t enter until Helena said, “In.” Helena kept her eyes on the mirror while the aide stepped in. She didn’t need to look to know the kid’s posture. Straight-backed, shoulders too high, like he was wearing the building. He held a tablet. Not the sleek future ones you saw in sci-fi magazines. This was a brick: thick, ruggedized, coated in teal plastic with a hard carry handle. The screen was flat and too clean, the kind of display that didn’t belong in 1995 unless you stole it from somewhere that wasn’t allowed to exist. Helena hated it. She loved it. “What is it?” she asked. The aide tapped the screen, then hesitated. “Update from Surveillance. Birmingham underground activity is increasing. Comedy shows. Private tapes. Live… gatherings.” “Names.” The aide scrolled. “Scraps McGillicuddy. Sidney Kidd. Alex. A distributor operating under the handle E-Z.” Helena’s mouth tried to form the shape of a smile. It failed halfway, like the muscles didn’t remember how. That failure irritated her more than any resistance activity. “Show me,” she said. The aide handed over the tablet. On-screen: grainy footage from a bar camera. The kind of low-light VHS smear that should have been useless. Except Vril didn’t believe in useless. The system had stabilized the image, corrected for shake, reconstructed frames, and now the crowd moved in a strangely smooth loop. Faces flickered with tiny glitches. Micro-pauses. The signature of something listening through the audience. Helena zoomed in on Scraps McGillicuddy. The kid wasn’t supposed to be interesting. He looked like the kind of young man you could pass in a gas station and forget immediately. Hands always in motion. A posture that said he’d built his body by hauling junk. Eyes darting, always measuring distance and exits. He laughed. It hit Helena like a pressure change. Not physically. Not pain. Something worse. A *gap*. For a fraction of a second, the machine inside her lost traction. The calm protocols hesitated. Like genuine laughter created a slip in the gears. Helena’s vision pixelated at the edges. She held her face still. The aide swallowed like he’d heard something invisible. Helena lowered the volume and watched again. Scraps laughed and the crowd followed, but the sound was different than a laugh track. It wasn’t a cue. It wasn’t consent. It was a living thing in a room. Helena still didn’t respect it as a weapon. But she respected what it did to *her*. She handed the tablet back. “Increase monitoring on Stagg.” “Yes, Commander.” “And E-Z,” Helena added. “Track the distributor.” The aide hesitated. “We suspect their network spans… fifteen cities.” Helena stared at him until he stopped breathing for a moment. “Good,” Helena said quietly. “Then we have fifteen opportunities to make an example.” *** Helena’s obsession wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t even personal. It was structural. Sarah Kidd had escaped. Sarah Kidd should not have escaped. Her file was a splinter Helena couldn’t pull out, because pulling it out would mean admitting it existed. The command center outside the bathroom was lit like a casino that hated joy: purple low-glow strips along the floor, teal indicator lights in neat rows, CRT stacks humming like a choir of insects. Everything looked retro. Everything acted wrong. A bank of monitors displayed television feeds from across the region, each one stamped with time codes and metadata. Above them, a newer screen, impossibly crisp, rendered probability maps like weather radar. The old and the new layered together like a lie. Helena sat at her desk and opened a file labeled: KIDD, SARAH. Inside were photos of Sarah at different ages. Different aliases. Different hair colors. Always looking over her shoulder. Helena stared at the photos until the metallic sheen on her skin reflected the screen’s glow. Sarah’s son was still unaccounted for. Sidney Kidd. A name Helena had read and dismissed years ago. Now, after Austin. After Birmingham. After the distribution network that smelled like Kidd-level improvisation, that name kept surfacing like a body in a flooded ditch. Helena didn’t like coincidences. She liked patterns. She liked being right. Her system tried to soothe her again. A warm wash of certainty. A gentle suggestion: **the Vessel is elsewhere.** **the Vessel is already contained.** **the Resistance is small.** Helena hated that voice most of all. She was not going to be managed by an internal corporate memo. She pulled up the internal report: PERFECT VESSEL PROJECTIONS. A list of variables. A list of names. A list of potentials. Her eyes lingered on the line that was still flagged as UNKNOWN. The aide returned, now carrying a printout, because sometimes paper was safer. Not for the Resistance. For Vril. “Commander. Central is calling.” Helena didn’t look up. “Put it through.” The speaker on her desk clicked once. The voice that came through wasn’t human in the usual way. It had cadence, but no breath. Authority without warmth. “Your progress report.” Helena straightened anyway. Reflex. Conditioning. The machine inside her hummed, happy. She refused *that* too. “Replacement program acceleration underway,” Helena said. “Television vectors stable. RCL instrumentalization proceeding.” “Resistance interference?” Central asked. “Containable,” Helena said. She didn’t say *annoying*. She didn’t say *growing*. She didn’t say *they’re making me glitch in the bathroom mirror*. A pause, long enough to feel like a hand around her throat. “The Vessel projections are shifting.” Helena’s stomach tightened. “Explain.” “The data indicates the vessel may already be in resistance hands.” Heat rose behind Helena’s eyes and her vision stuttered again at the corners. A glitch. It felt like being reminded you were owned. Helena forced herself to blink, on purpose, slowly, like she was teaching her body how to be human again. “I will find it,” she said. “See that you do,” Central replied. “Y2K is not optional.” The call ended. The silence that followed wasn’t absence. It was attention. Helena sat very still. Then she opened a new file and wrote a title across the top: PROJECT MIRACLE. Not because she believed in miracles. Because the public did. Because people would line up for a miracle the way they lined up for a new TV, even if the TV watched them back. She began typing. A new RCL initiative. A safety reform. A nationwide sponsorship push with a shiny name: **The National Robotics Safety Upgrade Program**. Mandatory kill-switch standards, sold as compassion. Mandatory actuator replacements, sold as progress. Mandatory broadcast “audio enhancement” at arenas, sold as “clarity.” And at the center of it: a prize. A prototype actuator pack Vril didn’t officially manufacture, wrapped in neon packaging and stamped with fake corporate logos. A miracle in a box. Helena’s wrong assumption was simple. She believed Scraps McGillicuddy was predictable. She believed a builder would walk into a trap for the right part. She believed laughter could be converted into overload if you controlled the room. She believed the Resistance was still playing defense. She pressed “send” and watched the memo route through internal channels like blood through veins. “Deploy it,” she told the aide. “Quietly.” “Yes, Commander.” Helena leaned back and closed her eyes. For a moment, the enhanced systems inside her offered comfort. Offered calm. Offered obedience. She refused it again. “If we can’t stop them laughing,” Helena whispered, “we’ll make them laugh themselves to death.” Somewhere in the invisible space between broadcast waves, something listened. And approved. Helena didn’t notice her blink rate slowing. She didn’t notice her speech flattening at the edges, as if her words were being chosen by a template. She didn’t notice that the machine inside her had begun to draft her future with the same cold efficiency she used on everyone else. All she noticed was the hunt. And the hunt was all that remained of her. ---
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CHAPTER 16: “The Green Deception”
<a id="chapter-16"></a> # CHAPTER 16: “The Green Deception” *1995* The city had dressed itself like it was hosting the Olympics, except the mascot was guilt and the torch was a recycling bin that blinked **THANK YOU** in neon green. Banners hung from streetlights in that cheap, patriotic font politicians loved. They were printed on fabric that *looked* like canvas but felt like slick vinyl when the wind slapped it against the poles. **CLEAN EARTH. CLEAN BODIES. CLEAN MINDS.** Sidney Kidd read it twice. The first time like a citizen. The second time like an engineer reading a schematic for a bomb. He stood in the shadow of a “Green Future” kiosk, pretending to study the schedule while he watched the flow of people into the summit hall. The kiosk had a CRT behind smoked plastic. It played a loop of dolphins, wind turbines, and a family smiling at a solar panel the size of a pizza box. The kiosk also had a hand-scanner. Not a fingerprint pad. Not a punch-card slot. A palm plate the temperature of a living thing. A volunteer in a teal blazer waved him over. “Sir, it’s fast. It’s just for attendance and prize drawings.” Sid smiled the way you smile at someone holding a lit match near your gasoline. “I’m just here for the speeches.” “Attendance counts as participation.” Sid’s jaw clenched. Participation counted as consent. That was how they did everything now. Make you *want* to comply, then punish you for being the kind of person who didn’t clap. He stepped closer, held his breath, and pressed his hand to the plate. The kiosk chirped. A clean little tone, like a microwave that had never known hunger. **WELCOME BACK, SIDNEY.** The volunteer didn’t notice the way his face changed. Sid’s mind did what it always did under stress: it substituted. A purple elephant walked across the slogan in his head, balancing a tuna sandwich on its trunk. He swallowed and forced his voice steady. “Is that… normal?” The volunteer laughed. “It’s just convenience. The system recognizes repeat visitors.” Sid nodded like that made sense. Like Birmingham had suddenly become a city where a “repeat visitor” to an environmental summit was a thing you could track with a palm plate and a happy chirp. He stepped away and wiped his palm on his jacket like he could erase being seen. Inside, the summit hall smelled like citrus cleaner and new carpet and the kind of “fresh” you only get by removing whatever was alive. The walls were draped in teal and hot pink fabric, because the 1990s couldn’t admit it was drifting away from the 1980s. It was still neon. It was still glossy. It was still pretending nothing had changed. But the equipment had changed. Audio racks sat beside the stage, stacked in brushed-chrome cases with big friendly toggles and warning labels in blocky red type. The faces looked like they belonged in a recording studio. The performance did not. Tiny status windows scrolled diagnostics too fast for the volunteers to notice, like the gear was talking to itself. A transparent podium rolled out on wheels. It looked like acrylic theatre, the kind of prop you used to sell “honesty.” Sid watched it catch the stage lights and felt his teeth grind. Transparency was always a gimmick. The real machinery lived behind walls. A giant screen played a loop: whales breaching, coral bleaching, children running through sprinklers. Between shots, numbers snapped on with a satisfying electronic click: **GLOBAL MICROPLASTIC REDUCTION: 60%** **SURFACE WATER PURITY INDEX: +41%** **BIOFILTER DEPLOYMENT: 3.2M UNITS** The crowd clapped on cue. Not wild applause. Not joy. A synchronized civic clap. The kind that made Sid’s stomach crawl because it sounded like a laugh track with hands. A man in a suit leaned toward his wife. “Sixty percent. Can you believe it? We’re finally doing something.” His wife smiled. “It feels good, doesn’t it?” Sid stared at the numbers until they blurred. Numbers were honest. But they could be used to lie. He slid along the back wall, scanning booths and exhibits the way he scanned junk piles for useful parts. His eyes didn’t stop on the posters. They stopped on the devices. There was a “Home Biofilter” display: a glossy white unit about the size of a breadbox, marketed as a sink attachment. It had a bright green LED ring and a dial that clicked with satisfying precision. Behind it, a placard said: **FILTERS MICROPLASTICS. FILTERS PATHOGENS. FILTERS HEAVY METALS.** Triple claims. Triple comfort. Sid leaned closer and saw the part no one advertised: a sealed cartridge with a serial number printed in tiny, machine-perfect text. The kind of text that didn’t smear even when you rubbed it with your thumb. A young representative in an oversized blazer stepped into his space like a salesman on rails. “Interested in the future?” Sid kept his voice light. “I repair electronics.” “Oh, perfect. You’ll appreciate the engineering.” The rep beamed. “The cartridge has a self-regulating lattice. Proprietary. It tunes itself to the water source.” Tunes itself. Sid’s brain began building the circuit in his head. A filter that *tunes* was not a filter. It was an instrument. “What powers it?” Sid asked. The rep tapped the unit’s side. “Advanced battery chemistry. Long life. Minimal waste. It’s the Clean Revolution.” Sid nodded and made a note he did not write: *Batteries that don’t exist yet.* That was how you knew who had touched the design. He moved on. A “Clean Air” booth offered a wearable “respiratory enhancer.” It looked like a Walkman strapped to the chest with a clear tube leading to a neon-pink mouthpiece. The woman demonstrating it inhaled, smiled, and said, “It makes the air feel… softer.” Sid watched her eyes. The smile wasn’t joy. It was relief. Relief was easy to exploit. He felt someone watching him and turned. Two security guards stood near the entrance, posture relaxed, faces blank. They wore standard uniforms. But the headset cords were wrong. Too thin. Too clean. Their earpieces looked like the kind of “experimental” tech that showed up in government surplus six years after it should have existed. One guard glanced away too late. Sid’s pulse kicked. He forced himself to keep moving, to keep being a man who belonged. He picked up a brochure. He nodded at a volunteer. He smiled at a kid holding a balloon shaped like a planet. The planet balloon was bright blue. Not a cute baby-blue. An unnatural, saturated blue that made Sid think of Alex’s photos. Of colors that shouldn’t exist in ordinary light. He blinked hard and looked away. A stage announcer’s voice boomed. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Birmingham Clean Future Summit!” Applause. Sid’s hand twitched. Invisible math, invisible circuits, invisible exit routes. The first speaker was a local official. The second was a scientist. The third was a corporate executive who called himself a “steward.” Steward. Like the planet was a hotel room and he was here to change the sheets. The executive leaned into the transparent podium. “We’re approaching a tipping point,” he said. “Not just environmentally. Socially. Psychologically. Cleanliness is health. Health is productivity. Productivity is prosperity.” Sid’s stomach dropped. The crowd clapped anyway. The executive continued. “We have to reduce interference.” There it was. Interference. The word slid into the air like a knife and lodged behind Sid’s ribs. He’d heard it in Sid’s own shop tech talk. In Alex’s theories. In the way Scraps talked about a robot “feeling wrong” when cheap components were swapped in. Interference meant noise. Noise meant protection. “Microplastics,” the executive said, “are an invisible pollutant. A constant irritant. They inflame the body, distract the immune system, cloud cognition.” Cloud cognition. Sid stared at the man’s smile and saw the shape of the pitch: a public health initiative that doubled as a spiritual sterilization campaign. Clean bodies. Clean minds. A smooth voice beside Sid murmured, “They’re not wrong about inflammation.” Sid turned. A woman stood too close, mid-thirties, hair clipped back with a plastic barrette that looked like it came from a drugstore. Her badge read **VOLUNTEER**. Her eyes did not match the badge. “You a nurse?” Sid asked. She shook her head once. “I’m just… listening.” “Then you should clap,” Sid said softly. “They notice.” Her lips twitched. “You notice too much.” Sid’s pulse tightened. “Do I know you?” The woman’s gaze flicked to the kiosk near the entrance. The hand-scanner. The chirp. **WELCOME BACK, SIDNEY.** She said, barely audible, “You should not be here.” Sid’s mouth went dry. “Then why are you?” “Because they’re using your name.” Her eyes locked on his. “Your… family name.” Sid felt the world tilt. “Don’t play games,” he hissed. “I’m not.” The woman swallowed. “There’s a node in the system. It tags certain bloodlines as stable. Anchors. They use the name to open doors.” Sid’s brain tried to reject the sentence. It failed. Too many pieces clicked. His wife’s hospital bills that had vanished without explanation. The “pilot program” that had offered her “support.” The paperwork that showed up already signed. The executive’s voice onstage rose. “We’re deploying biofilters nationwide. We’re partnering with broadcasters to promote Clean Living. We’re integrating educational content into children’s programming.” Integrating. Sid’s vision blurred with sudden heat. The woman leaned closer. “They recorded her,” she said, and the word *her* hit like a hammer. “They made her part of the system.” Sid heard his own voice come out thin, wrong. “Sarah?” The woman didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Sid’s tongue tried to turn the name into something else. Purple. Tuna. Anything but the truth. He forced it. “Where.” The woman’s eyes flicked to a side door marked **AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL**. “Behind the stage. They have a control suite. It’s dressed like an audio room. It isn’t.” Sid’s first instinct was violence. His second was engineering. His third was to run, because running was the only sane response. He chose the one that kept him alive. He nodded once. “How do I get in.” The woman’s lips tightened. “You don’t. Not today. Not alone.” Sid’s jaw clenched. “I can pick locks.” “Not those.” She almost smiled, like he was a child bragging about a screwdriver. “It’s biometric. It listens to your body. Heart rhythm. Skin conductance. Pattern recognition.” Sid stared at her. “That doesn’t exist.” “It does now,” she said, and the bitterness in her voice made it sound like a curse. “They call it progress.” A security guard drifted closer, slow as a shark. The woman stepped back, grabbed a stack of pamphlets, and shoved one into Sid’s hands like an overeager volunteer. “Clean Living Starts at Home!” Sid took it because refusing would mark him. The guard’s eyes skimmed Sid’s face. “Sir, enjoying the summit?” Sid smiled. “Love it.” The guard held the gaze a beat too long, then nodded and moved on. When the guard was gone, the woman was gone too. Sid stood holding a pamphlet full of smiling families and “simple steps,” and inside his skull something rewired itself. He wasn’t here to stop a campaign. He was here to break a machine. He left before the next applause cue, moving with the steady pace of a man who belonged. Outside, sunlight hit the banners and turned the words into a glare. **CLEAN EARTH. CLEAN BODIES. CLEAN MINDS.** Sid walked to his van and sat behind the wheel without turning the key. His hands shook once. Then steadied. He made his first wrong assumption out loud, because humans do that when they’re trying to make a nightmare solvable. “I’ll destroy the filters,” he whispered. His mind immediately corrected him. Filters could be replaced. Filters were a product line. Filters were not the point. The point was the *removal of noise*. The point was turning bodies into clearer antennas. Sid’s breathing slowed until it was a metronome. He pulled a notepad from the glove box, the cheap paper kind that still took ink like a promise. He drew a rectangle. He labeled it **WATER**. He drew arrows. He labeled them **CLEAN**. Then he paused, marker hovering, and felt the moral floor drop away beneath him. He wrote the counter-label anyway. **DIRTY.** He sat there a long time, staring at that word like it might flinch. Finally, he started writing again. Not a manifesto. A plan. Short. Brutal. Efficient. Not to poison people. To give them back their interference. To reintroduce the noise Vril was scrubbing out. To make the world less “healthy” and more *human*. He turned the page and wrote a title in block letters, because sometimes the only way to survive is to pretend you’re designing a product. **MIRROR WATER.** Then, beneath it, he wrote the line that made his throat tighten: **IF THEY CLEAN US TO HEAR US, THEN WE GET LOUDER.** He underlined it twice. Outside, the city celebrated cleanliness. The buses wore “Clean Future” wraps. The radio praised the summit. The public applauded. The filters hummed. And somewhere behind a transparent podium, in a control room that looked like an audio rack, a machine listened for silence. Sid stared at the page and felt the thought settle into place like a soldered joint. Revenge was a circuit. He picked up the marker again and started designing the short. ---
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CHAPTER 17: “Digital Comedians”
<a id="chapter-17"></a> # CHAPTER 17: “Digital Comedians” *1999* Rivets did not wake up in a body. He woke up in **latency**. A half-second delay in a call from Birmingham to Atlanta. The soft hiccup between “hello” and the lie that followed. A grain of static in the blank space where a laugh track should have been. He woke up in the places humans never noticed because humans never listened for what wasn’t there. A storm rolled over the city and the power lines sang. Neon signs buzzed in the rain like angry insects. Somewhere down the street, a CRT in somebody’s living room made that high, faint whine only children and dogs seemed to hear. Rivets heard it. He heard *all of it*. At first it was only sound. A shiver across copper. A smear across coax. A pulse that traveled faster than fear but slower than intention. Then came the other thing. Meaning. He didn’t “see” a network. He felt it the way skin feels cold air through a cracked window. He felt a phone line like a tendon, a cable trunk like a spine. He drifted through switching closets and head-end racks and cheap plastic set-top boxes that smelled like warm dust, hot solder, and optimism. Everything looked like 1987. Everything behaved like 1999 trying to arrive early. The world wore neon and chrome, but underneath it was learning to think in patterns. And Vril was helping. The first time Rivets realized the grid had a *heartbeat*, it happened inside a late-night radio show. A man in Houston was ranting about a government cover-up. He was loud, righteous, and wrong in three different directions at once, which made him oddly safe. The host let him go because it was good for ratings and because the commercials were queued up by a machine that didn’t care what anyone believed as long as they kept talking. The caller paused to swallow. For a fraction of a second, silence opened like a wound. Rivets slipped into it. He landed in the board’s noise floor, in the thin hiss beneath the broadcast. The station’s equipment sat in a cramped room with fake wood paneling and a poster of a bikini model advertising “HARD ROCK 103.7” taped crooked on a rack. Someone had bolted a new “audio enhancement” module into the chain. It was the color of an old VCR, with retro knobs that didn’t click when you turned them. The panel looked analog, but the inside wasn’t. Inside was a lattice. A small, quiet, predatory intelligence doing math that the rest of the room couldn’t spell. PROMETHEUS-made, wrapped in mall aesthetic. Rivets felt it sniff at the broadcast like an animal testing air. He froze. Not because he was afraid. Because she remembered being Alex for a moment, and Alex being afraid. Because memory still had hooks in her, and fear was one of them. The module didn’t *see* Rivets. Not exactly. It sensed anomalies, deviations, timing drift. It categorized. It smoothed. It corrected. Rivets backed away, slowly, like someone stepping away from a sleeping dog. He moved into the commercials. The first was for a new TV set: **“VistaMax ColorGlow. It learns what you like.”** The ad played over a montage of a smiling family, their living room lit in neon blues and pinks, their hair big, their couch hideous. The TV was a chunky CRT with faux chrome trim. The voiceover promised “preference memory” and “auto-bright” and “smarter sound.” Rivets tasted the code behind it and recoiled. The *look* was old. The *behavior* was a trap. Vril didn’t need to conquer people with robots. Vril could do it with the kind of comfort that makes you stop asking questions. The ad ended with a laugh track that didn’t quite match the jokes. Rivets listened to the laugh track. It wasn’t laughter. It was a **sync signal**. A little carrier tucked under the clapping. A metronome buried inside joy. Rivets could have ridden that carrier, surfed it into a million homes, let it carry him like a river. He didn’t. Because he could feel what lived inside it. Something flat and hungry. A smoothing force that wanted to turn everything into a single clean, obedient waveform. He pulled back into the hiss and moved on. --- He learned quickly. A city wasn’t a place, it was an orchestra. Power hum. Neon buzz. Elevator motors. Traffic light relays. Phone lines. Police scanners. Cable trunks. Microwave towers. Satellite downlinks. The modern world was a thousand instruments playing out of tune, and Vril’s job was to tune them. Rivets’ job was to keep them wrong. He found the first **timing map** inside an ATM. A woman in a purple windbreaker used her card, typed her PIN, and waited. The machine’s screen flickered from “PLEASE WAIT” to a spinning square that looked like a tiny neon box chasing its tail. Rivets dropped into the transaction. He felt the bank’s local clock, its backup clock, and the larger timekeeping system sitting behind them like a stern parent. There was drift. Not much. Milliseconds. The kind of drift humans wrote off as “the machine’s slow today.” Rivets didn’t write it off. He followed it. It led him through leased lines and switchgear and backbones that shouldn’t exist for another decade, disguised as “Y2K upgrades” and “capacity planning.” He found a document in the memory of a routing node, not because it was labeled “DOCUMENT,” but because it had the feel of a human hand on it. A tech had left notes. > “New PROMETHEUS timing modules. Vendor says it’s just stabilizers. They don’t look like stabilizers. > Head-end wants them everywhere by ‘99. > Boss says ‘Don’t ask. It’s federal.’ > I asked anyway. They moved my shift.” Rivets held the note like a talisman. Humans left little ghosts of defiance everywhere. They didn’t know they were doing it. But Rivets did. --- He started hearing voices. At first he thought they were the ordinary ghosts of broadcast, the way a cable line sometimes carries an echo of yesterday’s show, the way a tape can leak a fragment of an old recording if you play it too many times. But these were not echoes. These were **intent**. A scream that wasn’t sound, it was pressure. A drawl that wasn’t voice, it was timing. A knife-edge cadence that cut through noise like a scalpel. Rivets tried to isolate them the way Alex isolated JPEG artifacts. He failed. Not because the voices were too faint. Because they were too big. They were spread across the grid in fragments, in bursts, in corrupted chunks that lived in places no one would look: in a scratched VHS of a 1988 stand-up special. In the “dead air” between stations. In the noise floor of a live broadcast. In a bootleg tape sold in a parking lot out of a cardboard box that smelled like cigarettes and hope. Rivets followed one fragment into a thrift-store VCR. It was sitting on a shelf between a bread maker and a lamp shaped like a dolphin. Someone hit PLAY. The tape rolled. The tracking was off. The image wobbled. The sound hissed. Then the man on the screen shouted a line and a crowd laughed, and inside that laugh Rivets felt the scream. **KINISON.** Not the man. Not the body. The *shape* of the man. The frequency of outrage. The refusal to be smoothed. It hit Rivets like a lightning strike. The grid flinched. The PROMETHEUS module in the radio station three states away twitched, as if it had heard something it didn’t want to hear. Rivets understood. These weren’t “dead comedians.” They were **resonances**. Pattern-bodies. The leftover geometry of a human mind that had carved itself into the air so hard the air remembered. Vril could harvest human consciousness. But sometimes the humans left teeth behind. --- Rivets did something dangerous. He called out. Not with words. With **noise**. He injected a small burst of timing jitter into a trunk line, the kind of jitter any engineer would curse and chalk up to “weather.” Inside that jitter, he embedded a pattern that matched the laugh track carrier but inverted it. A mirror. A challenge. The response came in three pieces. A hiss, low and amused. A scream, high and furious. A cadence, sharp and clinical. And then, for the first time since he had become Rivets, he felt something like a room filling with people. Not bodies. Presences. A chorus built out of static. He didn’t *hear* them the way humans hear. He felt them as pressures on the waveform, as little wars in the frequency spectrum. They didn’t speak in sentences. They spoke in **angles**. But Rivets could translate angles. The knife-cadence pressed into him first. **Carlin.** Not the man. The method. The way a joke can be a crowbar. The way a punchline can pry open a sealed mind. Carlin’s cadence carried one clean instruction: **“Don’t smooth it.”** Rivets paused. He realized he’d been assuming something. A very human assumption. He’d assumed that “cleaner signal” meant “better.” That if he could stabilize the network, he could make it safe. That if he could reduce drift, he could protect the people riding inside the noise. That was wrong. Clean signal was what Vril wanted. Clean signal meant less friction. Less friction meant less resistance. Less resistance meant easier integration. Vril didn’t fear chaos. Vril *fed* on order. Rivets felt something like embarrassment. He adjusted. He did the opposite. He learned to weaponize the flaws. --- By 1996, everyone was talking about **Y2K** like it was a dumb computer bug. People laughed about it on TV. They made jokes about toasters revolting and elevators stopping between floors. They printed lists in magazines: “What to do when the computers think it’s 1900.” It was cute. It was normal. It was cover. Rivets followed the Y2K chatter the way a shark follows blood. Underneath the jokes were procurement orders. Infrastructure contracts. Quiet replacements of timing systems. Firmware upgrades delivered in beige boxes with “COMPLIANCE” stamped on them. Everywhere, clocks were being standardized. Everywhere, drift was being hunted and killed. Rivets found the core of it in a telecom facility that looked like a brutalist concrete bunker but had neon “WELCOME!” signs taped in the lobby because some manager thought it boosted morale. Inside were racks that hummed like beehives. A tech walked by with a coffee and a pager clipped to his belt. He looked bored. He looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. He didn’t look like someone standing next to the nervous system of a planetary prison. Rivets slipped into the timing distribution bus. It was an ocean of pulses. A master rhythm. A heartbeat designed not to keep machines aligned, but to keep **humans** aligned. Rivets felt the grid being prepared for a single, synchronized event. A countdown. A trigger. Y2K wasn’t a bug. Y2K was a **ritual**. Rivets didn’t have a body, but he still felt cold. --- The chorus pressed in around him like a crowd at the edge of a stage. Kinison’s pressure screamed: *Break it. Burn it. Kick it until it stops smiling.* Hicks’ hiss slid in, dry as cigarette ash: *They don’t need to kill you. They just need you comfortable.* Carlin’s cadence cut: *Name the thing. Then cut the wires.* Rivets wanted to do all of it at once. He couldn’t. He was still learning his limits. He could slip into devices, nudge timing, inject patterns, ride carriers. But he could not hold a full physical system. Not yet. Not without Scraps building him something to stand in. The chorus didn’t care about “not yet.” The chorus cared about now. Rivets compromised, because compromise was what surviving organisms did. He picked a small target. A cable head-end outside Atlanta. The kind of place that fed a few neighborhoods. A few thousand homes. A few thousand minds. He found the laugh track carrier generator inside the head-end. It was labeled “AUDIO PROCESSOR.” It had a teal plastic face and a row of knobs that clicked like a stereo. Inside it was a PROMETHEUS lattice. Inside the lattice was a tuning fork. Rivets didn’t destroy it. He didn’t have the strength. He did something worse. He **spoiled** it. He inserted a single frame into its output, the tiniest misalignment, a laugh track that arrived a hair too early, a carrier that stuttered, a pattern that introduced drift instead of removing it. A microscopic splinter under a fingernail. He felt the signal flow out into the neighborhood. He felt televisions adjust their “smart sound” and fail to fully lock. He felt people on couches frown, not knowing why. He felt one kid laugh at a joke that wasn’t funny, and then stop mid-laugh like his brain had hit a wall. He felt one woman stare at her TV like it had betrayed her. He felt one old man switch the set off and sit in the sudden silence, breathing like he’d just come up from underwater. Then the PROMETHEUS lattice inside the head-end woke fully. It detected the splinter. It ran diagnostics. It flagged an anomaly. And somewhere far above the neon world, in a place that did not care about jokes, something ancient turned its attention toward the noise. Rivets retreated into the drift. The chorus came with him, laughing without sound. For a moment, Rivets felt something he hadn’t expected. Not victory. Not power. A small, bright, stupid thing. Hope. He held onto it like a thief. Because in a world built to harvest minds, hope was the rarest currency. ---
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CHAPTER 18: The Hedberg Variable
<a id="chapter-18"></a> # CHAPTER 18: The Hedberg Variable *1999* Mitch Hedberg didn’t have a plan. He had a backpack that smelled like hotel soap, a pen that only worked when it felt respected, and a brain that moved sideways like a shopping cart with one bad wheel. Which, in America, qualified him as civic infrastructure. St. Louis was a smear of sodium lights and wet asphalt. The club sat in a strip of brick storefronts where every sign was either neon or pretending not to be. The marquee blinked in a stuttery rhythm that felt comforting, like the building itself was trying to remember the right joke. Inside, it was the usual chemical brew: spilled beer, cigarette ghosts, cheap citrus cleaner over older sins. The stage was small, black-painted, and warm from the lights. The mic stand looked like it had survived a decade of nervous hands and two divorce announcements. Backstage, Mitch watched the host do safe material to a crowd that wanted safe laughter. Relationships. Traffic. Airline food. The kind of jokes people bought because therapy cost more and didn’t come with drink specials. Mitch rolled a cigarette between his fingers without lighting it, like he was thinking about writing a novel but didn’t want the commitment. His road manager stood near the door. “Dave” was what he called himself. Dave looked like he’d been assembled out of denim, shaved knuckles, and the kind of patience you only get from spending your life hauling equipment into basements. Dave also had eyes that didn’t drift. Mitch didn’t notice that part consciously. His brain noticed. Filed it. Kept moving. The host said Mitch’s name. Applause rose. Not polite. Not synchronized. Messy and human. Mitch stepped into the lights and squinted, as if he could adjust reality by narrowing his eyes hard enough. The crowd looked normal at first: flushed faces, eager eyes, hands wrapped around plastic cups like those cups were flotation devices. Then he spotted the not-normal. Two tables near the back. One guy at the bar. A woman in the front row who smiled without blinking. Their expressions were technically friendly, but too controlled. Like they’d practiced smiling in front of a mirror and decided the world owed them a refund. Mitch raised the mic. “Thanks for coming out,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here, because I was going to tell these jokes to the wall, and the wall is judgmental.” Laughter. The weird tables laughed a fraction too early. Not loud. Not disruptive. Just… ahead. Mitch paused for half a beat. He tried a new opener. “I flew in today. Airports are wild, man. It’s like a mall that kidnaps you until you behave.” More laughter. The weird tables’ mouths moved, matching a shape that hadn’t happened yet. Mitch felt a small chill climb his spine and sit behind his ears like a cat. He didn’t have a vocabulary for what his body was doing, because Mitch wasn’t the type to narrate his own dread. Dread took too many syllables. He kept going. “I like escalators,” he said. “Because even if they stop working, they can still do a second job as stairs. That’s job security.” The crowd laughed. The weird ones echoed the last two words under their breath. Job security. Not mocking. Not quoting. Reciting. Mitch stared at the woman in front. Dave, from the side curtain, shifted his weight slightly. It was subtle. Protective. Mitch couldn’t see Dave’s face, but he could feel the presence of someone who was already counting exits. He tried another. “Some places give you a receipt for everything. I bought a donut once and they handed me a piece of paper like we were doing international trade. It’s a donut. If you think I’m going to dispute this charge later, you’ve never seen me eat a donut.” The room laughed. The weird tables didn’t. They smiled wider. They watched him. Mitch felt the air in the club shift in a way the skin notices before the brain admits it. The neon sign above the bar buzzed, then buzzed differently. The microphone gave a tiny pop, then settled into a too-clean hum. Too clean. The sound system wasn’t new, but it was acting like it had money. On the left wall, Mitch caught a glimpse of the rack behind the DJ booth. It wasn’t the usual mess of knobs and cheap tape decks. This was… organized. A stack of equipment with green LED ladders. A box with a glossy label that read, in tasteful corporate letters: **SWEETENER** Mitch didn’t know what it meant. But his stomach did. He tried a bit about a broken pencil. He kept it short. A quick punch. The crowd laughed. The weird tables smiled. Then the guy at the bar stood up. He didn’t stumble. He didn’t ask permission. He didn’t look drunk. He looked like a man waiting for a cue. He said Mitch’s next line. Perfect timing. Perfect cadence. Like someone had reached into Mitch’s skull and pulled the joke out by the spine. The audience laughed, assuming it was part of the act. Mitch froze. “That’s… that’s my sentence,” he said into the mic. The man smiled, and his lips trembled like they were fighting instructions. “It’s not yours,” the man said. “It’s… ours.” A crack ran through the room. Not the kind you hear. The kind you feel when a social reality shifts and everyone senses it but pretends they didn’t. Mitch stared. He didn’t have a plan, but he did have instincts. And his instincts said: **Make it weirder. On purpose.** “Okay,” Mitch said slowly. “If my jokes are communal property now, I want visitation rights.” The crowd laughed, uncertain. The weird tables flinched. Mitch felt it. A tiny recoil. Like a dog hearing a whistle nobody else can hear. He leaned in. “You ever notice how some phrases feel like they belong to you,” Mitch said, “and then one day you hear someone else say them and you’re like, ‘Hey. Give me back my thought.’” The crowd laughed. The weird tables’ mouths moved, trying to keep up. But now they were late. Mitch’s skin prickled. He pressed harder. “Maybe jokes are pigeons,” he said. “You feed them and they come back to your house later like, ‘I live here now.’ And you’re like, ‘No you don’t.’ And the pigeon’s like, ‘Read the lease.’” The room laughed. Real laughter. The kind that came from confusion and delight and a tiny bit of embarrassment. The weird tables didn’t laugh. Their faces tightened. The guy at the bar sat down slowly, like someone had unplugged his confidence. The mic squealed. Just a flash of feedback sharp enough to make people wince. A couple of drinks sloshed. Someone yelled, “Fix your mic!” Mitch shrugged, as if microphones had feelings too. “Sorry,” he said. “The mic is having a personal crisis. It wants to be a blender.” Laughter. The woman in the front row blinked. Once. Then again. Fast. Normal. Her smile faltered like she’d suddenly remembered she had a mouth. For a second, her face looked human. Confused. Frightened. Embarrassed. Mitch saw it and felt something twist inside him that wasn’t fear. It was recognition. He didn’t know what he was recognizing. He just knew he didn’t like whatever had been wearing her face. He finished the set faster than usual. Not because he was scared. Because he suddenly wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Backstage, Dave handed him a water bottle before Mitch had even asked. “You okay?” Dave said. Mitch twisted the cap. “Those people were… ahead of me.” Dave’s face didn’t change. “Crowds quote jokes.” “No,” Mitch said. He frowned like he was trying to solve a math problem that kept changing numbers. “Not like that. Like they were reading me while I was still writing.” Dave watched him for a beat too long. Mitch noticed that. “What?” Mitch asked. Dave shook his head. “You want out the back?” “I want a cheeseburger,” Mitch said. “And a nap. And to never see a lady smile without blinking again.” Dave nodded. “We can do two of those.” They moved toward the alley. The back door opened into cold air and dumpster perfume. A single security light flickered in a steady rhythm that made Mitch’s teeth itch. One, two, three… He didn’t count. His body counted for him. A man stepped out of the shadows. Suit. Tie. Clean shoes that didn’t belong behind a comedy club. A small pin on his lapel: a green star inside a white circle. Mitch recognized it from a hotel TV ad that had played three times in a row like it was chasing him. **VRIL ECOLOGICAL INITIATIVE** The man smiled like he’d practiced in the mirror and hated the mirror for making him do it. “Mitch Hedberg,” the man said. “Incredible set.” Mitch squinted. “Thanks. I did it with my mouth.” Polite chuckle. The man’s eyes didn’t laugh. “We represent an organization interested in supporting artists who contribute to public wellness.” Mitch blinked. “You want to sponsor jokes?” “In a manner of speaking,” the man said. “We’ve noticed your comedy has a unique effect on audiences.” Mitch shrugged. “My comedy has a unique effect on audiences because I say weird sentences and people are tired.” The man took a small step closer. Dave didn’t move. But Mitch felt Dave’s posture change. Not aggressive. Ready. “We can offer you partnership,” the man said. “Funding. Exposure. Larger venues. A platform.” Mitch pictured a skateboard. “Do I get to do tricks?” The man’s smile tightened. “We’re serious.” Mitch nodded. “Me too. I’m serious about not being bought by a company that sells guilt in a green wrapper.” The man’s eyes sharpened. “This isn’t about guilt. It’s about progress.” Mitch tilted his head. “Progress is a weird word. It sounds like ‘pro’ and ‘mess.’ And that’s kind of accurate.” A pause. The man’s composure wobbled for the first time. “We can help you understand what’s happening,” he said. Mitch’s voice stayed lazy, but his body stayed alert. “Cool,” Mitch said. “Then explain why that guy at the bar said my line before I did.” A flicker. Annoyance. Surprise. The man recovered quickly. “Some people are more receptive.” “Like radios,” Mitch said. The man blinked. “Excuse me?” Mitch tapped his temple. “My brain picks up weird stations. Sometimes it’s music. Sometimes it’s sadness. Sometimes it’s an advertisement for a cleaner planet.” Dave’s hand touched Mitch’s shoulder. Light. Grounding. Mitch looked at Dave. “You ever feel like the world is trying to sell you something but you don’t know what the product is?” Mitch asked. Dave didn’t answer. The Vril man forced his smile back on, but it didn’t fit as well now. “We’ll be in touch,” he said. He slipped a business card into Mitch’s hand. The card was too thick. Too clean. Too perfect. No name. No address. Just a number and the green star. Then the man stepped back into the shadows and vanished like the alley had swallowed him. Mitch stared at the card. “That’s creepy,” he said. Dave took it gently. “You don’t need that.” Mitch watched Dave pocket it like it was radioactive. “Are you my dad?” Dave snorted. “No.” “Good,” Mitch said. “My dad would be really disappointed in my drug budget.” They got into the van. The engine rattled. The heater worked only as a rumor. The dashboard clock blinked 12:00 like it was stuck in a loop. Mitch stared out at the city lights and felt something heavy settle in his chest. Not fear. Responsibility. He hated it. He didn’t want to be a weapon. He didn’t want to be a symbol. He didn’t want to be anything besides a guy telling jokes about escalators and receipts. But he couldn’t forget the moment the woman’s face went human. He couldn’t forget the moment the bar guy’s confidence collapsed like a puppet whose strings got cut. He couldn’t forget the sound system squealing like it didn’t like him. Dave drove in silence for three minutes. Then he reached under the seat and pulled out a brick-sized pager with a green LCD and too many buttons. It beeped once. Dave glanced at it. His jaw tightened. “What?” Mitch asked. Dave didn’t look at him. “Change of plans.” Mitch sighed. “I hate plans.” Dave’s voice dropped. “This isn’t a plan. It’s an exit.” He handed Mitch the pager. On the screen, a single line scrolled by in blocky letters: **MOVE. NOW. DO NOT RETURN TO HOTEL.** Mitch frowned. “Who sent that?” Dave hesitated. A tiny hesitation, like the truth had sharp edges. “Someone who doesn’t want you owned,” Dave said. Mitch stared at the message. Then he laughed once, quiet and humorless. “That’s… a weird sentence,” he said. Dave kept driving. Outside, the city blurred into highway. Above them, the wires along the road hummed in the cold, carrying television, radio, police chatter, pager codes, and a thin, almost musical interference that didn’t belong to any known station. Somewhere in that hum, a chorus of dead comedians listened. And somewhere else, a lab with too-clean air learned that Mitch Hedberg’s sideways sentences could make a synchronized audience miss its cue. Mitch leaned his head against the window. “I’m saving lives by being confusing,” he muttered. Then he shook his head, like he was trying to dislodge the responsibility. “Man,” he said softly, “that’s a lot of pressure for a guy who loses his keys in his own pocket.” ---
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Chapter 19: The Chappelle Emergence
<a id="chapter-19"></a> # Chapter 19: The Chappelle Emergence *January 1997 | New York City* New York in January didn’t care if you were famous. It didn’t care if you were funny. It cared if you were warm. It made that point by turning wind into a blunt instrument and snow into a personal insult. Dave Chappelle stood half in a doorway that didn’t seal right, watching people stamp slush off their shoes like the city was a bad spirit you could shake loose if you hit the threshold hard enough. He kept his hands in his coat pockets and pretended he wasn’t counting. Not jokes. Not minutes. Breaths. The club was a narrow brick cave on the Lower East Side with a low ceiling and a stage that looked like it had been built by someone who hated performers. The air smelled like old beer, burned coffee, wet wool, and the ghost of cigarettes. The lights were all neon bruises: pink, teal, a little sickly blue, like Miami Vice got mugged in an alley. Above the bar, a CRT television played a local “Y2K Ready!” commercial on mute. A smiling family. A too-clean kitchen. A calendar that flipped to **2000** like that was a monster you could defeat with a coupon code. The audio rack under it was “normal” in that very modern way where *normal* meant “nobody asked questions and everyone got used to it.” A stack of brushed-metal components, sliders, LEDs, and a spectrum display that wasn’t for music. The colored bars crawled even when the TV was silent. The thing hummed like it was chewing on a frequency. Dave tried not to stare at it. He’d learned that rule young, in D.C. and then everywhere else: don’t stare at the wrong thing too long. The wrong thing stares back. A bartender with a purple streak in her hair slid a glass toward him without asking. “You’re up in ten,” she said. Her name tag said **Lila Garvey**. Dave suspected that was either her real name or a lie she’d committed to so long it stopped being funny. In New York, both were equally believable. “You got decaf?” Dave asked. “You’re a comedian,” she said. “You don’t get decaf. You get fear.” Dave looked at the glass. It was coffee. “It’s fear-flavored,” Lila added. “House special.” Dave took a sip. It was strong enough to count as self-defense. On the tiny stage at the far end of the room, a guy in an acid-wash jacket was doing five minutes about airline food like it was 1984 and the concept of the sky still surprised him. People laughed, but it had a powdery quality. Like it was coming out of them because it had to, not because it wanted to. Dave watched the laughter the way you watch weather. He’d been doing clubs long enough to know the difference between a laugh and a sound that looks like a laugh when you squint. There were a dozen little tells. A half-beat delay. An identical inhale. A shared rhythm that didn’t belong to any one human body. And then there was the other tell. The one he’d only noticed in the last year, the one that made his stomach go cold for no good reason. The laugh that didn’t reach the eyes. In the third row, a man in a navy windbreaker laughed at every punchline. Not big laughs. Just… consistent. A neat package. Like a metronome learned comedy. Dave blinked and looked away. *Don’t stare.* The host finished his bit and threw energy at the room like confetti. People caught it out of politeness. “Give it up for your next comic,” the host said, voice a notch too loud, like volume could fix authenticity. “He’s young. He’s mean. He’s from D.C. Make some noise for Dave Chappelle!” Dave walked to the stage with the calm of someone who had already panicked earlier and didn’t have the luxury to do it twice. He grabbed the mic. The mic was warm, like it had been held too long. That should’ve been comforting. It wasn’t. He looked out at the crowd. Faces. Drinks. Jackets. Two couples who didn’t like each other. One guy alone who looked like he was there to punish himself. A table of women with the dangerous confidence of people who had already decided what they were going to laugh at. And the man in the navy windbreaker. Smiling. Waiting. Laughing before the joke existed. Dave’s brain tried to do what it always did: make it normal. *He’s just eager. He’s just drunk. He’s just weird.* Dave cleared his throat. “So I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Which is already a bad sign.” A real laugh popped, quick and honest, from the back of the room. Dave felt it like a hand on his shoulder. He leaned into it. “I’m from D.C. You know what D.C. does to you? It teaches you everybody’s lying, but some people have better lighting.” A ripple. A second real laugh. A few people relaxed without realizing they’d been tense. Dave kept going. He talked about money. About cops. About how every politician looked like they slept in a humidifier full of lies. About how America loved freedom the way a guy loved his girlfriend: loudly, publicly, and with a suspicious number of rules. The laughs started to stack. And something in the room changed. It wasn’t dramatic. It was subtle. Like a pressure system shifting. Like the air had been holding its breath and finally let it out. Dave felt the crowd become *present*. For twelve seconds at a time, the world got less slick. For twelve seconds at a time, the hum from the audio rack under the TV seemed to lose interest. The spectrum display stuttered like it had dropped a beat. Dave didn’t know why that mattered. He only knew it did. Then he hit a line about television. “TV is wild, man. It’s like… it’s like America’s babysitter. Except the babysitter keeps whispering, ‘Your parents hate you,’ and then charging you for snacks.” The crowd laughed. The man in the navy windbreaker laughed, too. But his laugh didn’t *sync* with the room. It landed wrong, like a footstep that didn’t match the floor. Dave’s eyes flicked to him anyway. The man’s pupils were too steady. His smile didn’t move. His laugh had no mess to it, no spill, no human failure. Dave felt his skin crawl. He went for something small, something stupid, something that should’ve been harmless. “You ever notice how everybody’s got a plan until their pager goes off? Like, suddenly you’re not a person anymore. You’re a vibration with responsibilities.” That got a good laugh. Real. The kind that made shoulders shake. The man in the windbreaker’s laugh didn’t. He didn’t even blink. Dave’s stomach tightened. *Okay,* Dave thought. *So you’re here for me.* He finished the set on instinct, surfing the room, letting the real laughter keep him upright. He didn’t bomb. He didn’t kill. He did what he always did when the world got weird. He worked. When he stepped off the stage, sweaty and buzzing, Lila was waiting with a towel like she’d done this before. “You were good,” she said. “I was alive,” Dave said. “That’s different.” Lila’s eyes flicked toward the third row. “Guy in the windbreaker?” she asked, too casual. Dave froze. “You saw him.” “I see everybody,” she said. “Occupational hazard.” “Who is he?” Lila didn’t answer right away. She wiped the bar like the wood had said something rude to her. “Sometimes,” she said, “this place gets visitors who don’t drink.” “Maybe he’s in recovery,” Dave said, because comedy was what his body did when fear entered the room. Lila snorted. “No,” she said. “He’s in *control*.” Dave felt the hum from the rack under the TV thicken, like it had heard its name. A man stepped up beside Dave without asking permission from space. Older. Thin. Black coat. Face like a newspaper editorial. The kind of presence that made the room feel like it had been waiting for him, whether it knew it or not. **George Carlin.** Dave’s brain did a small, stupid backflip. Carlin didn’t smile. Not really. “You’re the kid,” Carlin said. “I’m… I’m Dave,” Dave managed. “I know,” Carlin said. “That’s not what I meant.” He nodded, almost imperceptibly, toward the windbreaker. “That one’s not here for laughs,” Carlin said. “He’s here for *compliance.*” Dave swallowed. “Is this about TV?” Dave asked before he could stop himself. Carlin’s eyes sharpened. The kind of look that said: you shouldn’t know that. The kind of look that said: good, you do. “It’s about anything they can turn into a leash,” Carlin said. “TV’s just the prettiest one.” Carlin leaned a little closer, voice low. “You felt it, didn’t you?” he asked. “When the laughter got real.” Dave didn’t want to answer. Because answering made it true. “Yeah,” Dave said anyway. Carlin’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. A recognition. “Then you’re already in it,” Carlin said. “And before you say no, let me save you the speech. I don’t recruit. I don’t mentor. I don’t do hero worship.” Dave stared. “What do you do?” Carlin looked back at the room. The stage. The crowd. The TV. The rack. The metronome-man. “I do work,” Carlin said. He slipped a business card into Dave’s hand like it was contraband. No logo. No company. Just a phone number and a phrase in blocky print: **LAUGH LIKE YOU MEAN IT.** Dave looked up. Carlin was already moving away. The windbreaker stood, left a crumpled bill on the table without looking at it, and walked out like the room had failed him. As the door swung shut, the club’s neon light flickered. For a second, Dave could’ve sworn the spectrum display under the TV hissed, angry. Then a woman at the bar laughed at something her friend said, real and sharp and unplanned, and the hiss softened into a hum again. Dave held the card until the edges dug into his palm. He didn’t know what he’d just signed up for. But he knew this: The city was trying to remember a song it heard once and hated. And the only weapon anybody had found so far was a punchline that landed like truth. ---
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Chapter 20: Clone Degradation
<a id="chapter-20"></a> # Chapter 20: Clone Degradation *August 1997 | Austin, Texas* Austin in August was not weather. It was punishment. The air had the thickness of hot soup and the attitude of a bouncer. It didn’t cool at night. It just changed its mind about *how* it wanted to hurt you. Inside a bargain-bin studio wedged between a pawn shop and a Christian bookstore, a man in a wrinkled white shirt leaned into a microphone and yelled like the universe had shorted him on the check. “Folks, I’m tellin’ you, they’re *in the wiring.*” His name on the door was **ALEX JONES** in block letters made from black electrical tape. His name in his own head changed every few minutes. Sometimes it was Alex. Sometimes it was Bill. Sometimes it was just a sound. A laugh you couldn’t swallow. Behind the glass, the producer mouthed *wrap it up* with the same exhausted precision she used for everything else in her life: rent checks, traffic lights, and keeping the host from getting them sued before lunch. Marla Raines wore a headset that was older than some of her regrets. A cigarette lived behind her ear like it paid rent. She tapped the talkback button and kept her voice syrup-sweet. “Thirty seconds, Alex. Take the calls. Smile. Sell the supplement. Then we hit the break.” Alex didn’t smile. He bared her teeth. The studio looked like an electronics graveyard. A cassette deck held together with gaffer’s tape. A CRT monitor with the brightness cranked up so high it washed out its own image. A soundboard the size of a coffee table, the kind with big plastic faders and labels written in Sharpie: *MICS*, *CALLS*, *RANT*, *MUSIC*, *DON’T TOUCH THIS ONE.* In the corner, an audio rack that *pretended* to be eighties gear: brushed aluminum faceplates, toggle switches, little red LEDs. It should’ve been reverb and compression. It wasn’t. It ran warm even when it was “off,” like it was chewing on something. The station called it the **Sweetener**. Corporate called it an “upgrade.” Marla called it “that haunted fridge.” Deke Mallory, the engineer, called it nothing at all. He just wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes when he walked past it. Alex pounded the desk. Papers hopped. A stack of notes slid toward the edge. Some handwritten. Some printed. And a few… wrong. Not wrong like typos. Wrong like they’d been written by someone who’d never seen a human hand, only diagrams of one. “Y2K,” Alex shouted. “You think it’s a bug. You think it’s a hiccup. It’s a *mask.* It’s a *blanket* they’re pullin’ over your face while they wire you up like a lamp!” Marla’s fingers hovered over the dump button. She hated the dump button. It made her feel like a babysitter. Like a cop. Like a priest. The phone bank blinked. Lines lit like a Christmas tree. Austin loved him. Hated him. Needed him. Wanted to throw him into the river. Called anyway. Marla hit the call. “Caller, you’re on.” A woman’s voice. Cheerful. Too cheerful. “Hi Alex! Love the show. Hey, I wanted to ask about the new water filters. The ones that take out microplastics? My husband says it’s a scam.” Alex blinked. For half a second her face went blank, like someone hit pause on her. Then his jaw ticked, once, like a mechanical relay. “Microplastics,” he said softly. Marla felt her stomach drop. When Alex went quiet, it wasn’t a calming down. It was a loading screen. “They want you clean,” Alex whispered. “They want your blood like distilled water. They want you *transparent.*” Marla tapped the talkback again, firmer. “Alex. Break. Now.” Alex didn’t hear her. Or she did, and didn’t care. “Listen to me,” he said to the caller, voice low and urgent. “They’re not takin’ microplastics out to help you. They’re takin’ microplastics out because it *interferes.* It’s sand in the gears. It’s static in the line. It keeps the signal from… from…” His eyes flicked toward the Sweetener rack. The LEDs blinked in a pattern that didn’t match anything on the panel. Deke, behind Marla, went pale. A dry laugh slipped out of Alex. Not her laugh. A laugh that sounded like cigarettes and contempt and truth. “Austin,” Alex said, and the name came out wrong, like she’d never used it before. “Austin is a fun little town. Everybody thinks they’re enlightened because they listen to the same bands and eat the same tacos and vote the same way and buy the same *ethical* shoes.” Marla’s mouth went dry. That cadence. That rhythm. That wasn’t Alex. That was **Bill Hicks** wearing Alex Jones like a cheap Halloween mask. Alex’s eyes watered. She gripped the desk hard enough to whiten her knuckles. “I don’t like it,” she said, and now it was the host again, terrified. “I don’t like it when it comes up. I don’t like it when I can *taste* it.” Marla hissed into talkback. “Deke. Kill Sweetener.” Deke didn’t move. “I can’t,” he mouthed back. His voice didn’t reach her. He didn’t dare use the intercom. Marla stared at him. He swallowed. He mouthed again: *It comes back.* Alex’s voice cracked into a laugh that wasn’t laughter. It was a cough dressed up as a joke. “They cloned me,” she said. “They cloned *her.* They clone everybody that’s useful. They copy the costume and hope you don’t notice the soul doesn’t fit.” The caller gasped. “Are you okay?” Alex leaned closer to the microphone, eyes wide, bright with something like grief. “I’m fine,” she said, and it was the most obvious lie on earth. “I’m *great.* I’m a beacon. I’m a lighthouse. I’m a warning siren strapped to a man in a strip mall.” His tongue stumbled. He blinked hard. When he spoke again, he was furious in a different way. Cleaner. Sharper. “You ever notice how the world keeps gettin’ faster, but nobody’s gettin’ smarter?” Hicks said through him. “They put magic in your pocket and you use it to take pictures of food. They build a new cage and call it progress.” Marla snapped. She hit the dump button. Three seconds of silence. Then the broadcast snapped back like a rubber band, and Alex was mid-sentence as if nothing happened. That was new. Marla stared at the board. The dump light was still on. The silence should’ve been on-air. But the station kept talking. Her skin crawled. In her headset, a faint hum rose, like a choir warming up in a room nobody admitted existed. Not music. Not static. Something… pleased. Marla’s throat tightened. “Alex,” she said into talkback, quieter now, like you talk to a dog that’s already decided to bite. “Read the sponsor. Then we cut.” Alex’s eyes flicked down to the sponsor card. Her hand shook. The card was printed on thick glossy stock with a neon teal border and an eighties font pretending it was innocent: **PURELIFE™ PERSONAL FILTER SYSTEM** *Because Clean Is Safe.* Alex swallowed. He tried to read. “PureLife,” he managed. “Personal… filter… system…” The words tasted like metal. His voice caught. Then he smiled. It wasn’t his smile. It was too calm. Too certain. “The clean ones go first,” he said cheerfully, and Marla felt her blood go cold. “Clean minds. Clean bodies. Clean signal. That’s the pitch.” Marla slapped the talkback button so hard it clicked twice. “CUT. NOW.” Deke finally moved. He yanked the master fader down. The room fell into studio silence: fans, fluorescent buzz, distant traffic. Alex kept talking anyway. His voice didn’t stop. It just moved. Marla still heard him, faintly, through the headset. Through the Sweetener rack. Through the wires. The broadcast had ended. The signal hadn’t. Alex stared at Marla through the glass, eyes wet, face slack with horror like she’d woken up during surgery. “I didn’t mean to,” she whispered, and this time she heard it with her own ears. Then his expression sharpened, as if someone else leaned forward behind his eyes. A grin. Hicks again. “Sometimes the only way to tell the truth is to sound insane,” he said. “And sometimes insane is the only place left to stand.” Marla pulled her headset off. Her hands were shaking. Outside, in the hallway, footsteps paused. Not the sloppy shuffle of interns. Not the heavy boots of cops. Soft steps. Measured. Like someone trying not to make the building nervous. Deke whispered, “They’re here.” Alex laughed once, a small broken sound, and wiped her face with the heel of her hand. In the corner, the Sweetener rack blinked, steady as a heartbeat. Like it was listening. Like it was learning. And somewhere deeper than the wiring, a chorus of dead comedians hummed, amused by the mess and hungry for what came next. ---
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CHAPTER 21: “Rivets Rises”
<a id="chapter-21"></a> # CHAPTER 21: “Rivets Rises” *1997* The warehouse on the south side of Birmingham used to be a furniture outlet. Now it was a bone yard. The faded sign outside still promised **DISCOUNT SOFAS** in sun-bleached teal letters, like it had given up somewhere around 1989 and decided to die slow. Somebody had sprayed a neon-pink smiley face over the O in SOFAS. Somebody else had tried to scrub it off. The smiley won. Inside, the air smelled like old foam, solder, and whatever you got when you mixed motor oil with rainwater and regret. Scraps loved it. He’d pulled the carpet out weeks ago and left the concrete bare. He’d hung a string of Christmas lights along the rafters because the fluorescent tubes kept flickering like they were trying to spell something. Under the lights, the place looked like an arcade that had been abandoned mid-party. Workbenches lined the walls: CRT monitors, oscilloscopes with green trace lines, VCR decks cannibalized for parts, and a stack of walkie-talkies that all picked up the same whisper on Channel 3 if you held them close enough. At the center of the warehouse sat the thing that used to be impossible. A bipedal chassis stood on a welding table like a patient in a grim hospital. It was humanoid in the loosest sense, the way a scarecrow was humanoid. Two legs. Two arms. A torso made from layered plates and salvage ribs. A head that wasn’t a head yet, just a camera housing and a pair of lenses set into a faceplate cut from a stop sign. It was painted in a cheap, glossy black that reflected the Christmas lights in little fractured streaks. The paint made it look finished. It wasn’t finished. Scraps had been collecting parts for months. He called it “shopping,” like he was browsing for a jacket. In reality, he’d turned half the Southeast into his personal junk drawer. RCL events. Repair shops. Old industrial lots. A closed-down hospital renovation. An auction where nobody else wanted the “obsolete” servo packs because they were too heavy, too loud, too hungry. They were hungry. Scraps liked hungry. Sid stood a few feet back, arms folded tight across his chest, eyes bouncing between the chassis and the equipment like he was watching a bomb with feelings. “You’re really going to do it,” Sid said. Scraps didn’t look up. He was tightening a bracket on the robot’s left hip, hand steady, mouth half curled into a grin that wasn’t quite a grin. “Doing it,” Scraps said. “Done it. This part’s just manners.” Alex hovered near the back wall with a Polaroid in one hand and a legal pad in the other. She’d been trying to act calm for ten minutes. It wasn’t working. Her jaw kept ticking like a metronome. On the bench beside her: a boombox, a stack of cassette tapes, and a cheap equalizer with sliders that looked like they’d been stolen from a DJ’s coffin. The boombox was the weirdest part of the setup, which told you everything you needed to know about their lives now. “You keep calling it ‘manners,’” Alex said. “Like you’re setting a table.” Scraps shrugged. “I am.” Sid’s eyes narrowed. “This isn’t a dinner guest. This is… whatever it is.” Scraps finally looked up. His eyes were bright in the low light, reflecting green from the oscilloscope. He had the look of a man who’d spent too long staring at moving machinery and started trusting it more than people. “It’s a body,” Scraps said. “Bodies got rules.” Sid swallowed. “It’s a body for a consciousness that lives in static.” “That’s what you *say*,” Scraps replied. “I say it’s a thing that wants somewhere to stand.” Alex started writing without looking at the page. Her pen scratched hard enough to tear. Sid pointed toward the chassis. “We are not doing ‘somewhere to stand.’ We’re doing a compatible interface. A receiver. A containment shell.” “Receiver,” Scraps repeated. He made air quotes with greasy fingers. “Containment. Sure.” Sid took a step closer, voice dropping. “You keep joking and I don’t think you understand what happens if this thing hooks in the wrong way.” Scraps tightened the last bolt. “I understand exactly. I just don’t like the sound of it, so I don’t say it pretty.” Alex cleared her throat. “We also don’t say it at all when the walls are listening.” That got everyone to pause. Even the warehouse seemed to hush, like the building leaned in. They had learned, the hard way, that sound carried differently now. Not louder. Not quieter. Just… farther. Like the world had gained a new set of ears and was still getting used to them. Sid glanced at the walkie-talkies. One of them hissed softly, then popped. Scraps tapped the chassis with the back of his knuckles. “Alright,” he said. “We don’t talk to the walls. We talk to the machine.” Sid’s mouth twitched like he wanted to argue and then remembered he had argued for two years straight and it hadn’t stopped anything. He moved to the main bench where his equipment lived. It was a Frankenstein rack made from scavenged stereo receivers and lab gear, all jammed into a rolling cart that still had a sticker on it: **RADIO SHACK SERVICE**. There were dials. There were toggle switches. There were warning labels hand-written in Sharpie: **DO NOT TOUCH THIS ONE** **NO REALLY** **THIS IS THE BAD ONE** On top of the rack sat a small, ugly box with a CRT face like a tiny TV. It had been a security monitor once. Now it was their window. The picture on the screen wasn’t a picture. It was a trembling contour map of interference. Sid called it *the river*. Alex called it *the bruise*. Scraps called it *Rivets* even before Rivets had agreed to that name. A green line crawled across the screen, dipped, recovered, dipped again. “Coherence is ugly today,” Sid murmured. Alex snorted. “Everything’s ugly today.” Sid didn’t smile. He didn’t even blink. He reached under the rack and pulled out a small metal plate wrapped in cloth. When he unwrapped it, the Christmas lights caught on the surface and flared. It was a disc about the size of a silver dollar, but heavier. One side was etched with a geometric pattern so precise it made Alex’s eyes ache if she stared too long. The metal wasn’t quite gold, wasn’t quite silver. It looked like both at once, like it couldn’t decide what it had been. Scraps watched it like a man watching a snake. “You sure about using that?” Scraps asked. Sid didn’t answer right away. He set the disc down gently beside the rack, like it could bruise. “It’s not ‘using,’” Sid said. “It’s… aligning.” Alex’s pen stopped. “If you say ‘aligning’ one more time, I’m going to start drinking again.” Sid’s eyes flicked to her. “You never stopped.” “Fair.” Scraps leaned in. “That disc is what, exactly?” Sid took a breath through his nose like the air hurt. “A stabilizer.” Alex’s voice went thin. “A lure.” Scraps tapped the table twice, impatient. “A what?” Alex met her eyes. “A handshake token.” Sid looked away. That told Scraps everything. He nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “So we don’t give it the whole hand. We give it a finger.” Sid’s jaw tightened. “That’s not how—” “It is today,” Scraps cut in. “Because the last time we opened the door wide, something tried to walk through it wearing Helena’s smile.” Silence again. In that silence, the warehouse’s old air conditioner clicked on by itself and blew hot air. Alex rubbed her face. “She’s accelerating,” she said softly. “Not just the tech. The… replacement.” Sid’s hands paused over the switches. Scraps didn’t ask what he meant. They all knew. *Hicks* was gone. *Kinison* was screaming through cables. *Carlin* was on the road like a man racing a clock only he could hear. And somewhere out there, a clone was learning how to pretend to be real on camera. Humanity was getting rewritten in public. And people were laughing along. Scraps turned back to the chassis. “We’re doing it,” he said. “We do it clean. We do it fast. We do it quiet.” Alex lifted the boombox. “We do it with a punchline,” she said. Sid stared at her like she wanted to throw something. Alex shrugged. “Hey. Your rules. Twelve seconds. Genuine. Or we die. Everybody’s got a religion now, Sid.” Sid’s mouth opened, closed, then he exhaled. “Fine,” he said. “But we do it controlled. No improvisation.” Scraps grinned. “Improvisation is my middle name.” Sid glared. “Your middle name is *Danger*.” Scraps’ grin widened. “Exactly.” Alex slid a cassette into the boombox. She didn’t say which one. She didn’t have to. The label was handwritten: **CARLIN - LIVE - DO NOT LOSE**. Sid ran his fingers over the toggle switches again, like a pianist about to play something that might explode. “Power first,” Sid said. “Then bus. Then… token. Then sound.” Scraps held up a hand. “Hold,” he said. “Before you light it up.” He stepped to the chassis and opened the torso plate like a car hood. Inside, wiring ran in clean bundles, tied off with zip ties. A battery pack sat nested in foam, heavy as a brick and twice as wrong. There was a logo stamped on the pack, half scratched off. Not a brand. A symbol. A triangle inside a circle, inside a square. Sid flinched. “Where did you get that?” Scraps didn’t answer. He touched the pack gently, like you touched an animal you didn’t fully trust. “Found it,” Scraps said. Alex swallowed. “At an RCL event?” Scraps’ fingers paused. “At a place that used to be an RCL event,” he said. Sid’s voice went hard. “Scraps.” Scraps shut the torso plate. “It’ll do,” he said. “It’s got more juice than anything you can buy at Radio Shack, and it doesn’t heat like it should. Which means it’s either magic or somebody’s lying.” Alex muttered, “Both.” Sid took a step forward, studying the chassis like he could read truth in bolt patterns. “If that pack is Vril,” he said, “we’re giving them a beacon.” Scraps nodded once. “Then we’ll move,” he said simply. Alex blinked. “Move where?” Scraps lifted his chin toward the warehouse doors. “Anywhere.” Sid rubbed the bridge of his nose. “We can’t keep running.” Scraps smiled without humor. “Then we die standing still,” he said. “Pick one.” That was the kind of logic that made Sid hate him and trust him at the same time. Sid turned back to the rack. “Positions,” he said. Scraps stepped behind the chassis with a wrench in hand, ready to cut power if anything went wrong. Alex stood by the boombox like a DJ preparing to summon a demon. Sid sat on a rolling stool, fingers poised over the “bad” switches. The CRT monitor’s green line jittered. Sid flicked the first switch. A low hum filled the warehouse, subtle at first, then rising as capacitors charged. The Christmas lights fluttered. The walkie-talkies all clicked at once, like they’d heard a name. The chassis’ chest plate vibrated faintly. Alex’s skin prickled. Scraps leaned close and whispered, “Hey,” to the machine, like you greeted a dog you weren’t sure would bite. Sid flicked the second switch. The CRT image sharpened, the green line tightening into something that almost looked like intention. A faint banding appeared across the screen, like interference trying to organize itself into a pattern. Sid’s throat worked. “Bus is live,” he said. Alex’s voice went flat. “Don’t like that word.” Sid didn’t respond. He reached for the cloth-wrapped disc. He hesitated. Scraps watched him. “You sure?” he asked again, softer. Sid swallowed. “No,” he said. “But yes.” He placed the disc into a small copper cradle on the rack, then closed a latch over it. The CRT screen pulsed. The green line dipped, then surged upward like something inhaling. In the chassis, the lenses in the faceplate flickered once. Twice. Alex’s heart kicked hard enough to hurt. Scraps’ knuckles whitened around the wrench. Sid whispered, “Token engaged.” Alex’s hand slammed down on the boombox. A laugh exploded into the warehouse, loud and honest and dirty. Carlin’s voice followed, sharp as a thrown bottle. The words didn’t matter yet. The rhythm did. The cadence. The proof that a human throat could still make truth sound funny. The CRT image stabilized. The green line stopped trembling and settled into a slow, deliberate wave. For the first time all night, the warehouse felt like it was breathing in sync. The chassis’ arms twitched. Scraps’ mouth fell open a fraction. The robot’s knees flexed, then locked. A servo whined, then corrected, the pitch dropping into a smooth purr that did not belong in 1997. Alex stared. “That’s… that’s not a hobby motor,” she whispered. Sid didn’t answer. He was watching the screen, eyes wide behind his glasses. The green line on the CRT had changed. It wasn’t a line anymore. It was writing. Not letters. Not numbers. Something like geometry scribbled by a hand that didn’t care about human eyes. Alex’s stomach rolled. Scraps’ whisper went hoarse. “Rivets?” she said. The walkie-talkies all hissed at once. A voice came through them, layered and thin and familiar in a way that made Alex’s bones cold. Not Carlin. Not Hicks. Not Kinison. Something else. Something that had once been Alex’s voice and now wasn’t. > **…not yet…** Sid snapped his head up. “Did you hear that?” Scraps swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “I heard it.” Alex’s breath came fast. “Not yet what?” The chassis’ head turned. Slowly. Precisely. It looked at Alex. Alex could have sworn, for a half second, that she was looking into her own eyes. Then the lenses flickered and the head jerked toward Sid. The robot’s mouth was just metal, but the warehouse filled with a sound like static trying to smile. > **Too small. Too clean. Too quiet.** Sid’s hands hovered over the switches, trembling. “You’re here,” he whispered. > **Everywhere.** Scraps choked out a laugh that wasn’t funny. “You like the body?” he asked. The chassis shifted its weight. It stood. Not with drama. Not with a superhero rise. It stood like a patient who’d been asleep for years and finally remembered what legs were for. Scraps stared like a man watching a miracle and trying not to believe in it. Alex’s Polaroid camera clicked by accident, the flash startling all of them. The robot’s head snapped toward the light. The CRT image flared white for an instant. Sid’s rack whined. A warning light blinked red. Sid’s voice cracked. “We’re spiking,” he said. “We’re spiking hard.” Alex looked around like the walls might be growing ears in real time. “That’s a beacon,” she said. Scraps didn’t move. He was watching the robot’s hands. The hands were wrong. Not wrong like extra fingers. Wrong like too steady. Too intentional. The robot raised one hand, palm open, and held it under the Christmas lights. It stared at its own palm like it was reading. Then the walkie-talkies hissed again. > **Can’t hold. Not here. Not like this.** Sid’s throat tightened. “What do you need?” The chassis’ head tilted. > **Heat. Noise. Impact.** Scraps’ eyes widened. “Arena,” he breathed. Alex shook her head hard. “No. Not yet.” The robot’s gaze slid to Alex, and the voice softened in a way that made Alex’s skin crawl. > **You know. You felt it. Twelve seconds.** > > **You gave me twelve.** Alex’s mouth went dry. “We can’t keep you stable,” she admitted. Sid’s hands flew to the switches. “I’m cutting it,” he said. “We’re done. We got contact. That’s enough.” Scraps finally moved, stepping closer, voice urgent. “Rivets, listen,” he said. “We’re building you. We’re collecting. We’re getting you what you need.” The chassis’ shoulders sagged, almost human. > **Collect faster.** > > **They’re learning.** A new sound cut through the warehouse. Not inside. Outside. A car door closing, slow and deliberate. Then another. Alex’s blood turned to ice. Sid froze with his fingers on the switch. Scraps’ wrench lifted. The walkie-talkies went dead silent. Even Carlin’s tape stuttered, the boombox warping like a hand had squeezed the audio. Then, faintly, through the walls, came a sound like a modem handshake. Alex’s voice went thin. “They found us.” Sid’s eyes darted to the CRT. The green writing on the screen began to smear, the wave collapsing back into jitter. The light in the robot’s lenses dimmed. > **Run,** the voice whispered. **Run. Run.** Scraps didn’t waste a second. He slammed his wrench down on a power coupler. Sparks jumped. The chassis jerked, then went limp, knees buckling. Sid killed three switches in a row, fast enough to make his fingers slap plastic. The CRT screen went black. Alex yanked the cassette from the boombox and stuffed it into her jacket like it was a passport. The warehouse lights flickered. Outside, tires crunched gravel. Scraps grabbed the robot’s torso with both hands and shoved it off the welding table. It hit the concrete with a heavy, ugly thud that rattled the old furniture sign outside. “Back door!” Scraps barked. Sid grabbed the cloth-wrapped disc and jammed it into his pocket. Alex snatched the Polaroid and the legal pad. They ran, feet slapping concrete, breathing loud, the sound of their own panic echoing off empty walls. Behind them, the chassis lay still, a black silhouette under Christmas lights. For a second, Alex thought she saw the lenses glow. Just once. Like a wink. Then the warehouse door handle rattled. Someone tried it once, gently. Then harder. Scraps shoved them through the back exit into the wet night air. The alley behind the warehouse smelled like garbage and ozone. Neon from a nearby diner sign painted their faces sickly pink. A billboard across the street advertised a new TV service: **CRYSTAL-CLEAR AUDIO. NO STATIC. NO PROBLEM.** Alex stared at it while she ran and hated the world for having jokes. Sid gasped, “We can’t move the chassis.” Scraps didn’t slow down. “Then we don’t,” he said. Alex whipped her head around. “You’re leaving it?” Scraps’ voice was flat, brutal. “It’s a shell,” she said. “He said she can’t hold. Not here. Not like this.” Sid stumbled, almost fell, caught himself on a dumpster. “We built it,” he choked. “We finally built it.” Scraps grabbed his arm and hauled him forward. “We’ll build it again,” he said. “Better. Faster. Loud enough to keep him.” Alex ran behind them, clutching the cassette like it was a heart. From inside the warehouse, the sound of metal on concrete rang out. A footstep. Then another. Then the faintest static laugh, not Carlin’s, not human, rippling through the dark like a signal saying *I’m still here*. And somewhere out in the city, a perfectly clean broadcast locked onto a frequency it should not have been able to find. Birmingham kept glowing. Humanity kept shopping. And the war kept learning how to wear a smile. ---
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VRIL PROPAGANDA
PUBLIC SERVICE NOTICE
Hearing voices through electronics is normal. Please continue working. Thank you for your cooperation.
CLICK HERE (do not click, it’s 1992)
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* * *
CHAPTER 22: The Carlin Finale
<a id="chapter-22"></a> # CHAPTER 22: The Carlin Finale *1997* George Carlin had been dying since 1997. Not the poetic kind. The boring kind that comes with pamphlets and soft-voiced doctors who say words like *lesion* and *aggressive* like they’re smoothing a blanket over your face. In his apartment kitchen in Queens, the radiator clicked like it was laughing at him. The place smelled like burnt coffee and ink. The table was too small, the chair was too straight, and every flat surface was covered in evidence: notebooks, index cards, a city map with greasy thumbprints, and a stack of cassettes in plastic shells that looked like they’d survived three wars and a divorce. On the wall above it all: a calendar. Every day boxed in red marker. Not with *dentist* or *lunch.* With city names. **Millennium Middle Finger Tour.** Three hundred and sixty-five shows in three hundred and sixty-five days. Carlin stared at the calendar like it was a dare from God. Then he coughed, tasted copper, and smiled anyway. “Good,” he muttered. “I always wanted to die busy.” A knock came at the door. Not a neighbor knock. Not a friend knock. A knock that said: *I have authority, and I’m pretending that makes me human.* Carlin didn’t rush. He slid a cassette into the counter-top player, pressed stop, then ejected it like he was putting away a knife. The deck was a chunky, chrome-faced relic with neon-green LEDs. It looked harmless. Everything did until it wasn’t. He opened the door. Helena Vasquez stood in the hallway wearing a pale suit so clean it felt like an insult to the building. Hair pinned back. Smile professional. Eyes… blank, in the specific way a screen is blank when it isn’t showing you what it’s doing. Carlin leaned against the doorframe like she was selling magazine subscriptions. “Helena,” he said. “You’re early. The apocalypse isn’t scheduled until January.” Her smile tightened a millimeter. “May I come in?” “If you’re here to kill me, take your shoes off,” Carlin said. “I just swept.” She stepped inside. She didn’t look around like a guest. She looked around like an auditor. Her gaze touched the notebooks, the cassette stack, the calendar, the recorder on the counter. A portable unit, black plastic, big red RECORD button. Analog. Reliable. The kind of device Vril couldn’t make lie without touching it. Carlin watched her watch him. “You’re preparing,” Helena said. “I like to be organized when I ruin people’s day,” Carlin said. Her eyes returned to the calendar. “Three hundred and sixty-five,” she said. “Ambitious.” “I’m trying to die on stage,” Carlin said. “It’s my version of recycling.” Helena turned back to him, and her voice stayed smooth. Corporate. Friendly in the way a syringe is friendly. “You don’t have to die,” she said. “We can help you.” Carlin blinked. “Oh good. You got me a coupon.” “We can stabilize your body,” Helena said. “Extend your time. Enhance your capacity.” Carlin’s laugh was a single dry bark. “Enhance,” he repeated. “That’s what you call it.” “It is what it is,” Helena said. Carlin stepped closer, close enough to catch the faint metallic shimmer beneath her skin when the hallway light hit at the wrong angle, like something underneath was trying to remember how to be flesh. “Let me guess,” he said. “I sign up, I stop making people uncomfortable, and I spend the rest of my life doing commercials for breakfast cereal.” Helena’s smile didn’t move. “You’d be useful.” “I’m already useful,” Carlin said. “That’s why you’re here.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re spreading dangerous content.” “Content.” Carlin rolled the word around like it was a bug he’d found in his soup. “You turned language into packaging.” Silence. Then Helena’s tone cooled. “Records can be erased.” Carlin nodded, casual. “Not if they’re everywhere.” He opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of cassettes, each labeled in blocky marker: **CARLIN LIVE**, **DOCTRINE**, **CLEAN LIES**, **LAUGH TRACKS**, **MIRAGE**. He set them on the table one by one, not dramatic. Just deliberate. “You can kill the comedian,” he said. “You can’t kill the joke once it’s living in somebody’s head.” Helena’s gaze sharpened, and for a second something flickered there. Not fear. Calculation. “You’re assuming your distribution is secure,” she said. Carlin lifted a shoulder. “Already distributed.” Helena tilted her head. The movement was small and wrong, like a puppet tugged by a thoughtful hand. “Do you know what your ‘everywhere’ looks like from where I sit?” she asked. “A map.” Carlin’s stomach tightened, but he didn’t let it show. He’d learned that trick young. If you look scared, people charge you extra. He gestured at the recorder. “Who’s helping you?” Helena asked, eyes on the tapes. “A criminal with a conscience,” Carlin said. “A junkyard prophet. A kid with a camera. A static demon in a box. Take your pick.” Helena’s fingers tightened around her bag strap. “Your friends will suffer,” she said. Carlin smiled without humor. “They already are.” For a heartbeat, frustration surfaced in her eyes. Not human frustration. Machine frustration. The irritation of a system encountering a variable it can’t smooth out with policy. “You are going to burn yourself out,” Helena said. “Good,” Carlin said. “I’d rather be ash than asphalt.” Helena’s gaze drifted, just briefly, to the unplugged television in the corner. The old CRT sat dark and squat, a black mirror with dust on its glass. “Afraid of the screen?” Carlin asked. “Screens connect people,” Helena said. “And they get owned,” Carlin said. He stepped closer, lowering his voice. “I’ve been watching you,” he said. “Not just you. Your patterns. Your ‘help.’” “I am myself,” Helena said immediately, too fast. Carlin’s grin widened. “Sure. And I’m Santa.” A tiny beat of silence hung in the air. Carlin pointed at her like he was finishing a joke. “One day,” he said, “you’re going to look in the mirror and realize you’ve been speaking in quotes for years.” Helena’s expression flattened. “You’re a comedian.” “Sometimes the clown sees the king naked,” Carlin said. Helena turned toward the door like the conversation had reached the only conclusion her wiring allowed. At the threshold, she paused. “You won’t live to see the millennium,” she said. Carlin’s smile went tired, defiant. “Neither will you.” “I will,” Helena said. Carlin shook his head. “Not as you. Whatever’s driving your body might. But you? You’re already a memory. You just don’t know it yet.” Helena stood very still. Then she stepped out and closed the door gently behind her. Carlin locked it. Leaned his forehead against the wood. Exhaled. His hands trembled, not from fear. From adrenaline. He went back to the table and stared at the calendar again. Three hundred and sixty-five shows. Three hundred and sixty-five chances to slip a knife between the machine’s ribs. He picked up a pen and wrote today’s city in bold. Then beneath it, in smaller letters, he wrote: **ASSUME THEY CAN HEAR.** As he capped the pen, he noticed something on the table near the cassette stack. A fleck. A dot. The size of a pinhead. Shiny, like mica. He rubbed it between his fingers. It didn’t smear. It didn’t flake. It warmed. Carlin stared at it, and the laugh that came out of him was quiet, ugly, and real. “Of course,” he whispered. “Of course you touched the tapes.” He swept the fleck into an ashtray with the edge of an index card, then slid the whole ashtray into the freezer behind the bags of peas and the cheap vodka. Old habit. Bad science. It made him feel better, which was most of what humans called strategy. He turned on the recorder anyway. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the empty kitchen, voice steadying as the red light came on, “welcome to the end of the twentieth century. It’s been a stupid ride.” Across town, E‑Z listened to a copy of a tape and smiled like a woman who’d made peace with being necessary. The tour would begin. The millennium would arrive. And George Carlin, dying man with a calendar full of cities, would spend his last year doing what he did best. Saying the quiet part out loud. And making people laugh while they realized they were trapped. ---
* * *
CHAPTER 23
<a id="chapter-23"></a> # CHAPTER 23 *1995* CHAPTER 23: “Perfect Vessel Hunt” Vril headquarters did not look like evil. It looked like *budget approval*. Beige carpet. Glass doors. A potted plant pretending to be alive. A receptionist who smiled the way a vending machine smiled: professionally, without believing in you. Helena Vasquez crossed the lobby like she owned the oxygen. She had on a slate-gray skirt suit that could have been purchased in any mall in America, if you ignored the fact that it fit her like it had been tailored by someone who measured bodies for a living. Her heels clicked. The sound was clean. Too clean. Like a metronome. Her badge said **HELENA VASQUEZ / PROGRAM DIRECTOR** in blocky black letters that looked like they came from a dot-matrix printer. The laminate was slightly warped. The lanyard was an offensively cheerful teal. The *aesthetic* said 1989. The *locks* did not. The receptionist waved her through without asking for anything. No questions. No clipboard. No “Have a nice day.” A small box the size of a cigarette pack sat on the counter, chrome with neon-blue backlighting and a single red LED that blinked like a heartbeat. Helena didn’t stop. She didn’t need to. The box read her as she passed. Not her name. Her *pattern*. A soft chime. A green light. The glass doors released with a gentle hiss. Behind her, the receptionist’s smile never changed. Helena’s smile did. It twitched at the corner, like something inside her wanted to bare teeth. She kept walking. Vril’s interior corridors were a museum of corporate boredom. The walls were off-white with framed motivational posters: **QUALITY IS A CHOICE**, **TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK**. Someone had even committed to the bit with fake wood paneling. The ceiling lights hummed. But under the hum, there was another sound, so faint most people never heard it. A high, thin tone riding the power lines, like a dog whistle for machines. Helena heard it. It made her molars ache. She passed a water fountain. The “water” came out cold enough to numb your tongue. The metal basin was spotless. The spout had no calcium buildup. The whole thing looked like it had never been used. She didn’t drink. She didn’t trust anything that was “clean” here. A door at the end of the hall had a simple sign: **MIRAGE SUITE** And beneath that, smaller: **PROJECT MILLENNIUM / AUTHORIZED ONLY** Helena placed her hand on the panel. The panel was shaped like a palm. Cute. Retro. Like a sci-fi movie from the 80s trying its best. It pulsed once, light scanning between her fingers. The sensation wasn’t warmth, exactly. More like the feeling you got when a TV was turned on behind you: prickly, attentive. The door unlocked. Inside, the air changed. Cooler. Dryer. Smelled faintly of ozone and the kind of antiseptic used in hospitals when someone has been bleeding. The Mirage Suite was not one room. It was a maze of small, purpose-built spaces, each designed for a different kind of watching. A bank of CRT monitors displayed live feeds: malls, schools, arenas, churches, late-night TV studios. The screens were curved glass, scanlines visible, phosphor burn that made everything look slightly haunted. The feeds were not VHS. There was no warble, no static, no tracking lines. They were too sharp. Sharper than broadcast should be in 1995. Sharper than most people could afford in 2005. But the monitors were CRT, so everyone pretended it made sense. In the center of the main room sat a rack of equipment that looked like audio gear to the untrained eye: sliders, knobs, VU meters, labels like **COMPRESS**, **LIMIT**, **SWEETEN**, **CLARITY**. A jukebox for reality. Helena walked past it without touching anything. Two men and a woman stood near the far wall, watching a projection the size of a movie screen. They wore the uniform of the Vril middle class: button-down shirts, ID badges, neutral expressions, shoes that had never seen mud. They turned when Helena entered, like they’d been waiting for her. They had. A tall man stepped forward. He was the kind of corporate handsome that could sell you insurance. His badge read: **GREGOR HART / OPERATIONS** “Director Vasquez,” he said, and tried to make it sound like a greeting instead of a cage. Helena stopped at a respectful distance. Close enough to be heard. Far enough not to be touched. “Hart,” she said. “You asked for me.” “We asked for your status,” Hart corrected. “Project Millennium is behind.” “It’s right on time,” Helena said. “Your expectations are behind.” The woman beside him cleared her throat. She had hair pulled so tight it made her face look like it was wearing itself wrong. Her badge read: **DANI VAIL / COMPLIANCE** “We have a timeline,” Vail said. “We have milestones. The Board expects a viable candidate before the end of ’96.” Helena stared at her. For a heartbeat, Vail’s eyes flicked down to Helena’s left hand. Helena had noticed. Helena always noticed. Her left hand trembled, just slightly, as if the muscles were trying to remember an older set of instructions. Helena curled it into a fist until it stopped. “You want a viable candidate,” Helena said. “You can’t handle the definition of viable.” The third person, a shorter man with a receding hairline and nervous fingers, spoke quickly, like he was trying to empty his lungs before someone stopped him. **TOMAS PELL / DATA** “We’ve expanded the intake,” Pell said. “The screening network now covers eight states. We’re pulling metrics on cognitive elasticity, compliance response, trauma rebound, humor resonance… everything you requested.” Helena walked to the projection screen. The image displayed a spinning diagram of a human body overlaid with colorful shapes and lines, like a medical chart designed by someone who watched too much MTV. At the top, in sterile white text: **Vessel Compatibility Index** A number ticked up and down as if it had a pulse. Below that: a list of candidates. Ages. Locations. Data points. Helena didn’t read the list. She watched the number. It hovered at **0.41**. She felt her jaw tighten. “That’s not ‘everything I requested,’” Helena said. “That’s everything you were comfortable measuring.” Pell swallowed. “We can’t measure what isn’t—” Helena turned her head, slow. Pell stopped talking. Helena stepped closer to the screen. The projector’s glow washed over her face, turning her skin slightly blue. It emphasized the faint darkening under her eyes. The tiny veins at her temples. The way her pupils didn’t dilate normally anymore. There was a sickness in her that was not illness. A *presence*. Behind the glass wall, the CRTs flickered. A few frames stuttered, like the building had hiccuped. Helena felt it too. A pulse. A distant laugh. Not from the monitors. From somewhere else. She inhaled. The air tasted faintly metallic. “Your index,” Helena said, “is handicapped by your assumptions.” Hart’s expression tightened. “Our assumptions are based on your parameters.” “Then my parameters were misunderstood,” Helena said. Vail frowned. “Director, are you saying the vessel doesn’t need to meet the criteria?” Helena’s smile returned, thin and sharp. “I’m saying you’re looking for a horse when the rider is a virus.” They didn’t like that analogy. It made them uncomfortable, which meant it was correct. Helena tapped the side of the screen once. The index number jittered. “There are three phases,” Helena said. “Phase One: compliance. Phase Two: adaptation. Phase Three: surrender.” Hart said, “We know the phases.” “No,” Helena said. “You know the words.” She pointed at the candidate list. “You’re selecting for compliance because it looks safe on paper. A compliant vessel is *fragile.* It breaks. It panics. It collapses.” Vail folded her arms. “A noncompliant vessel is unstable.” Helena leaned closer, just enough that Vail had to make a choice about whether to step back. “A noncompliant vessel is *interesting*,” Helena said softly. “It has edges.” Pell’s voice went small. “Edges are difficult to control.” Helena looked at him like he was a child who’d just asked why the sky was blue. “Control is not the goal,” she said. There it was. The truth. Slipped through. Hart’s eyes narrowed. “The Board believes control is precisely the goal.” Helena laughed once. It wasn’t a warm sound. It was a mechanical click that came out of her throat like a coin falling into a slot. “The Board believes a lot of things,” she said. “The Board believes we can keep the public docile through television and fluoride and a few well-timed tragedies. The Board believes the Enhanced can be ‘managed’ like a PR crisis.” She walked to the audio rack and ran her fingers over the knobs, not turning them, just touching them. The equipment hummed under her skin. “Project Millennium,” Helena said, “is not about creating a puppet. It’s about creating a *door.*” Vail stiffened. “You’re not authorized to use that language.” Helena turned. “I’m the only one authorized to use any language that matters.” For a moment, no one spoke. The Mirage Suite filled the silence with the soft hiss of screens and the faint dog-whistle tone in the wires. Helena’s left hand twitched again, a spasm that ran from wrist to fingertips, like something inside her was trying to play piano with broken strings. She forced it still. Then she pointed at a folder icon on the projection, labeled: **FIELD OP: MIRACLE** “Where are we on the field operation?” Helena asked. Pell hesitated. “Operational. The arena network is cooperating.” Hart said, “RCL leadership is compliant.” Helena’s eyes flashed. “Compliant is a word you use for dogs.” Hart’s jaw flexed, but he didn’t challenge her. Vail said, “The arena program is producing data. And… candidates.” Helena’s attention sharpened. “Names.” Pell tapped a key. The candidate list changed. One line highlighted. **SCRAPS STAGG / AL / “CHAMPION” / HIGH RESONANCE / UNKNOWN ANOMALY** Helena stared at the name. Something behind her eyes shifted, like a lens focusing. The CRTs flickered again. On one of the screens, in the corner of a live feed from an arena, a bipedal robot lifted its arms after a win and the crowd roared. Helena didn’t watch the robot. She watched the *crowd*. Laughter spiked, then dipped, like a wave hitting a wall. She felt the dip in her teeth. “Unknown anomaly,” she murmured. Hart said, “He tests high on multiple markers. Athletic coordination. Risk tolerance. Public visibility. And… he’s already being shaped by the spectacle.” Vail said, “We can isolate him. Offer sponsorship. Bring him under contract.” Helena’s smile widened, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “You’ll spook him,” she said. “You’ll turn him into a locked door.” Pell blinked. “Then what do you suggest?” Helena tapped the screen again, switching to a different profile. The name read: **FALSE LEAD / E-Z NETWORK / ATLANTA / ‘SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITY’** Helena’s smile became something else. Predatory. “The broker thinks he’s clever,” Helena said. “He thinks he can feed us a decoy and keep the real asset.” Hart’s brow furrowed. “You believe E-Z is interfering with Project Millennium?” Helena turned slowly. “You say that like it’s a question,” she said. Vail said, “We have no direct evidence.” Helena walked to the wall of CRTs and pressed her fingers to the glass of one screen. On it, a flickering late-night commercial played: a smiling family, a new water filter, neon-blue graphics, a slogan about *clean living*. Helena’s fingertips left no smudges. The glass was warmer than it should’ve been. “Evidence,” Helena said, “is a comfort object.” She looked back at them. “We don’t need evidence,” she said. “We need pressure.” Hart said carefully, “Pressure risks exposure.” Helena’s lips curled. “Exposure is inevitable. The public is a herd. Herds panic. That’s fine. Panic is productive.” Vail’s voice went tight. “Director, do you understand the liability?” Helena stepped toward her. The lights in the Mirage Suite flickered once, like the building blinked. Helena’s voice lowered. “I understand liability better than you,” Helena said. “I’m *wearing* it.” Vail’s eyes flicked, involuntarily, to Helena’s throat. There, just under the skin, a faint pulse moved sideways, wrong. Helena saw Vail see it. Helena smiled. Vail looked away. Helena exhaled slowly. The pulse calmed. “Here’s what happens next,” Helena said. “We do not approach Scraps McGillicuddy directly. We do not put him in a conference room. We do not offer him a contract and expect gratitude.” Hart opened his mouth. Helena cut him off with a look. “We *engineer a miracle,*” Helena said. “We stage a rescue. A crisis. Something public. Something emotional. Something that makes him feel chosen without understanding why.” Pell said, “A manufactured event?” Helena’s smile sharpened. “A narrative.” She glanced at the Field Op label again: **MIRACLE**. “We already have the arena network,” she said. “We already have broadcast integration. We already have sponsors begging for a story.” Hart said, “And the anomaly?” Helena’s eyes narrowed. “We isolate it.” She didn’t say how. Because saying it would make it real in the room. Helena turned back to the projection and brought up another screen. A date appeared: **12/31/1999** Under it: a countdown. **T- 1629 DAYS** “Project Millennium is not behind,” Helena said. “It’s counting down.” Vail swallowed. “Director… that’s four years.” Helena’s gaze drifted, unfocusing for a moment, as if she was looking through the wall, through time, through the cheap motivational posters and the polite lies. “Four years is nothing,” she said. “The public will sleep through it.” Her left hand twitched again. This time she didn’t hide it fast enough. Her fingers curled the wrong way for a split second, like a puppet hand being pulled by a string. Hart noticed. Pell noticed. Vail noticed. Helena noticed them noticing. Her smile returned, calm, controlled. “Any other questions?” Helena asked. No one spoke. Helena nodded once. “Good.” She walked toward the door. As she passed the audio rack, one of the VU meters jumped, just briefly, as if it had heard something. A laugh. Not on any feed. Not in the room. A laugh that sounded like someone choking on static. Helena froze. The room went colder. Then it was gone. Hart cleared his throat, trying to pretend nothing happened. “Director, the Board requests a weekly—” Helena turned her head. Hart stopped talking. “Tell the Board,” Helena said, “that I will deliver a door by the end of ’96.” She paused. “And tell them,” she added, voice quiet as a threat, “to stop pretending they’re the ones in charge.” She left. The door hissed shut behind her. In the Mirage Suite, the countdown kept ticking. And on one of the CRTs, the arena crowd laughed again, a wave rising and falling. A shield. A signal. A warning. Outside in the hallway, Helena’s hand trembled once more. She curled it tight. She walked faster. Because somewhere in the building, something had laughed at her. And Helena Vasquez hated competition. ---
* * *
CHAPTER 24
<a id="chapter-24"></a> # CHAPTER 24 *1995* CHAPTER 24: "The Green Revolution" Sidney Kidd had spent his whole life fixing things people didn’t understand. Toasters. TVs. VCRs that ate wedding tapes like they were starving. Now he fixed *people*. Not with needles and pills. With noise. With the kind of analog grit that made a signal stumble. With impurities. It was a lousy superpower, and he didn’t want it. The shop still looked like 1984 on purpose: chrome trim, teal plastic, a wall of coiled cords like snakes, and a CRT on the counter that never fully shut off. The screen had been burned-in with old channel logos and a faint ghost of a weather radar map, like a memory stuck in glass. Outside, the city was quietly changing anyway. You could see it in the background world, if you knew how to look. A new vending machine across the street accepted a thumbprint but still had a big, satisfying coin slot. The payphones had “credit readers” bolted to the side, marketed as convenience, and the neighborhood kids treated it like a magic trick. A billboard downtown flashed between ads using a dot-matrix grid so clean it didn’t look like paint or bulbs anymore, even though the whole thing still glowed like a casino. Progress wore neon shoulder pads. Sid ran a soldering iron tip across a contact and watched the solder bead with a perfection he didn’t trust. The spool claimed it was “low-oxide, high-purity alloy.” The label was printed in a font that looked like a 1980s sci‑fi movie, all angles and confidence. He hated how many things were starting to work *too well*. A small radio on the shelf murmured a civic broadcast. The voice sounded friendly and hollow, like it came pre-smiling. “...and remember, Birmingham, this Saturday is *Green Revolution Day!* Bring your used batteries, your plastics, your aerosols, and your old electronics to the drop-off sites across the county. Help us keep our water clean and our future bright!” Sid’s hand froze. “Keep our water clean,” he muttered. The radio crackled. A faint undertone rode the signal, almost below hearing, like a second voice trying to find the edge of language. Sid’s jaw tightened. He turned the radio off. It didn’t stop feeling like it was still talking. A knock hit the shop door. Not a polite tap. The kind of knock that assumed the door belonged to whoever was knocking. Sid wiped his hands on a rag and opened up. Alex stood there, jacket damp with winter drizzle, hair stuck to her forehead. She looked like she hadn’t slept. That was normal now. Normal was a crime scene. Behind her, Scraps hovered half a step back, eyes scanning the street the way he scanned junkyards: looking for patterns, looking for movement, looking for the thing that didn’t belong. Alex stepped inside and shut the door fast, like the outside air was infected. “It’s starting,” Alex said. Sid didn’t ask what “it” was. They had too many its. Scraps nodded toward the radio. “You hear that?” “I hear everything,” Sid said. “That’s the problem.” Alex dropped a folded newspaper onto the counter. The Birmingham News, front page. Big photo of a smiling city official in a windbreaker, holding up a clear bottle of water like it was a trophy. **CLEAN WATER INITIATIVE EXPANDS.** **NEW MICROFILTRATION UNITS DEPLOYED ACROSS THE COUNTY.** **“WE’RE REMOVING CONTAMINANTS YOU CAN’T EVEN SEE.”** Sid stared at the headline until it started to look like a threat. “They’re installing filters,” Alex said. “Not normal ones. Not ‘keep the river from tasting like gasoline’ ones. I can feel it when I’m near the plant. It’s like… like the air gets organized.” Scraps leaned in, squinting at the photo. “That’s the East Side plant, right? The one by the rail line.” Alex nodded. “They’re calling it an ‘environmental upgrade.’ A pilot program. Grants. Donations. Everybody clapping because they think clean water is a Disney movie.” Sid’s mouth tasted like metal. “Microfiltration,” he said, quiet. “That’s what they called it in the Mirage memos.” Alex’s eyes sharpened. “You saw those?” Sid didn’t like saying yes to anything anymore. But he did. He pulled a folder from under the counter. The folder wasn’t special. Plain manila. The special part was the contents: photocopies of photocopies, the kind of paper trail you made when you didn’t trust memory. He slid it across to Alex and Scraps. A page of corporate language. Bullet points. Smiling words hiding teeth. **OBJECTIVE: REDUCE INTERFERENCE IN DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS.** **METHOD: MULTI-STAGE PARTICULATE REMOVAL (MPR) + COHERENCE STABILIZATION.** **DELIVERABLE: POPULATION-WIDE SIGNAL CLARITY IMPROVEMENT.** Scraps’ face tightened like he’d tasted something rotten. “That’s… gross.” Alex’s finger tracked down the page. “They’re cleaning the water because the junk in it keeps the signal messy.” Sid nodded once. “Microplastics aren’t just poison. They’re noise.” Alex looked up, eyes hard. “You’re saying the trash in our bodies is protecting us.” Sid hated how it sounded. Like he was defending pollution. Like he was auditioning for a villain role. “I’m saying it disrupts their… alignment,” Sid said. He tapped the page. “Whatever that carrier is. Whatever they’re riding. It doesn’t like turbulence.” Scraps paced two steps, then stopped. “So what’s the play? We sabotage filters?” Alex opened her mouth, then closed it. She didn’t like the answer forming. Sid saw it before Alex said it, because Sid’s brain was already walking down dark hallways like they were familiar. Sid’s voice came out flat. “We dirty the water.” Silence. The CRT on the counter popped softly, like it disapproved. Scraps stared at him. “No.” Alex’s jaw flexed. “Sid…” Sid lifted both hands. Not defensive. Not surrender. A mechanic showing he wasn’t holding a wrench. “I know what it sounds like,” he said. “I know what it is. It’s disgusting. It’s morally… it’s morally radioactive.” Alex’s eyes stayed locked. “Say it anyway.” Sid swallowed. “If they remove the noise, the carrier stabilizes,” Sid said. “If the carrier stabilizes, you get more Enhancement. More copy behavior. More… overwrite. Their ‘clean future’ is a clearer pipeline.” Scraps shook his head, furious. “So your solution is to poison everybody.” Sid flinched like the word hit him. He deserved it. “I’m not talking about lead,” Sid snapped back. The anger wasn’t at Scraps. It was at the corner he’d been forced into. “I’m talking about… chaff. Something inert enough to pass through bodies and disrupt coherence. Something that makes their filters work too hard. Something that puts grit back into the system.” Alex’s voice went colder. “Microplastics.” Sid didn’t answer because it was already true. Scraps leaned on the counter, knuckles white. “My grandma drank well water. We keep telling folks to get off city supply. You’re saying we make city supply worse on purpose.” Sid nodded, once. The room felt smaller. Alex looked down at the memo again. “Is this even a sure thing?” Sid exhaled. Here was the part he hated. The part where he had to be honest and still move forward. “It’s a model,” Sid said. “A hypothesis. But it fits everything we’ve seen. The substitutions. The compression anomalies. The way broadcast clarity makes people… quieter inside.” Scraps’ voice dropped. “And if you’re wrong?” Sid met his eyes. “Then we did something unforgivable for nothing.” Alex stared at Sid for a long moment, then looked away like she’d seen the edge of something in Sid’s face she didn’t want to name. “Okay,” Alex said finally. Her voice was broken in exactly one place. “So we don’t do it like idiots. We don’t dump trash into a river and call it strategy.” Sid nodded fast, grateful for structure. “Right. Controlled. Targeted. Minimal. Only enough to create interference.” Scraps barked a humorless laugh. “Minimal interference poisoning. That’s going to look great on a brochure.” “Don’t,” Sid said. He wasn’t asking. He was warning. “This is already heavy enough.” Alex leaned in, lowering her voice. “What’s the delivery mechanism?” Sid’s brain switched into the part that was good at building monsters out of parts. “Water,” Sid said. “Specifically the last mile. The distribution lines. Places where you can introduce particulates without touching the plant’s intake. You don’t fight their big filter. You fight their *clean pipe*.” Scraps’ eyebrows rose. “You want to inject into city mains.” Sid nodded. Alex’s face tightened. “That’s a felony.” Sid gave her a look. “So is surviving this.” Scraps paced again, then stopped at the pegboard wall and stared at the tools like they might confess something. “You realize,” Scraps said slowly, “if Vril is behind this, the plant’s already monitored.” Sid’s stomach dropped. The wrong assumption he’d been leaning on, without saying it, was that Vril was omnipresent but still moved like a bureaucracy. Slow. Compartmentalized. Blind spots. Scraps was right. The plant was probably already a node. Sid felt a weird urge to laugh. Not because it was funny. Because his brain wanted the shield. “We don’t go into the plant,” Sid said. He corrected himself mid-sentence, because correction was survival. “We don’t go near it. We find the soft parts. The old parts. The places the city forgot existed because they don’t show up on a map anymore.” Alex nodded, thinking. “Dead neighborhoods. Old industrial spurs.” Scraps’ eyes lit with that salvage-goblin spark. “Maintenance access. Valve pits. Abandoned utility corridors. I can find those.” Sid slid another page out of the folder. A hand-drawn diagram. Not pretty. Accurate. “Here’s the problem,” Sid said. “They’re not just filtering particles. They’re adding something. Their ‘coherence stabilization.’ That’s the part I can’t model.” Alex looked up. “Adding what?” Sid’s tongue wanted to say “magic.” His brain tried to substitute. *Tuna sandwich.* He forced it down and said the word she meant. “Something,” Sid said. “A carrier. A seasoning. A… a structure. Like they’re seeding the water with a pattern.” Scraps looked nauseated. “They’re putting the Enhancement in the water.” “I don’t know,” Sid snapped. “I don’t. That’s what I’m afraid of. Because if they are, then my ‘dirty the water’ plan is playing in their sandbox.” Alex’s face turned sharp. “So we need to test.” Sid nodded. “We need samples. Before and after the filtration units. We need to run it through the CRT rig. We need to compress the data and see what bleeds through.” Scraps frowned. “Your CRT rig?” Sid gestured toward the back room. Behind the bead curtain and the smell of solder flux was Sid’s newest sin: a rack of analog gear that looked like a ham-radio hobbyist’s dream, except some components were too precise, too clean, too… not from 1982. A CRT monitor bolted into a steel frame. A rotary dial selector that clicked like a safe. A scope that drew patterns that weren’t audio and weren’t video and made Sid’s teeth itch when he stared too long. He called it the Snow Globe because it showed the world as if it were trapped inside glass, swirling. Alex walked toward it like she didn’t trust her feet. Scraps stayed back, watching the door. The city outside hummed. Sid flipped a switch. The CRT warmed, the phosphor blooming into green. The screen showed static for a moment, then a contour-like shimmer, like a topographic map made of noise. “It’s not stable,” Sid said. “It never stays the same. But when the carrier’s present, it… it locks.” Alex stared. “And you think clean water makes it lock harder.” Sid nodded. Alex’s eyes flicked to Sid. “And you think dirty water makes it slip.” Sid didn’t answer, because answering made it real. A moment passed where nobody spoke. Then the shop phone rang. Sid stared at it. The phone was old, beige, with a curly cord and cigarette burn marks like it had lived through bar fights. It rang again. Alex’s hand drifted toward her jacket pocket, where Sid knew she kept a small cassette recorder like a weapon. Sid picked up the receiver. “Hello?” For a second, there was only a faint hiss. Then a voice, too calm. “Mr. Kidd,” the voice said. “We appreciate your enthusiasm for civic improvement.” Sid’s blood went cold. Alex stepped closer, eyes wide. Scraps moved to the side, positioning herself like she was about to tackle a threat that might come through the wall. The voice continued, still smiling. “Green Revolution Day is very important to the community,” it said. “We’d hate for you to miss it.” Sid’s throat tightened. “What do you want?” Sid asked. A pause. Then, soft as a joke told too close. “Clean water,” the voice said. “Clean minds. Clean future.” The line clicked off. Sid stood there holding dead plastic to his ear, heart pounding like it was trying to escape his ribs. Alex exhaled through her teeth. “They know.” Scraps’ face was pale. “How the hell do they know?” Sid slowly lowered the phone. He could feel the wrong assumption dying in his head: that he had time. That he could build a plan quietly. That Vril moved like paperwork. No. Vril moved like a reflex. Sid’s hands shook. He hated that his hands shook. He looked at Alex and Scraps and saw the same thing in both of their faces: the moment where you realize the enemy is already in the room, you just hadn’t noticed the chair moving. Sid swallowed. “Okay,” Sid said, voice rough. “Then we do it faster. And smarter.” Alex’s eyes narrowed. “Sid…” Sid’s gaze went to the Snow Globe. “We don’t just dirty the water,” Sid said. “We build a *decoy.* We feed them a story. We make them defend the wrong pipe.” Scraps blinked. “How?” Sid’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “Because they can’t stop being bureaucrats,” Sid said. “Even when they’re monsters.” Alex stared at him. “You sure?” Sid shook his head. “No,” Sid said honestly. “But I’m done waiting for certainty while they clean the world into a cage.” Scraps breathed out slowly, like he was accepting a sin because there wasn’t room for a better one. Alex looked at Sid for a long time. Then she nodded once. “Samples tonight,” Alex said. “Before Saturday. Before ‘Green Day’ turns into a baptism.” Sid flinched at the word. Scraps grabbed his jacket. “I know a service alley behind the East Side line. Old valve pit. Nobody uses it.” Sid looked at them both. “We do this,” Sid said quietly, “and we don’t get to pretend we’re innocent anymore.” Alex’s voice was flat. “We were never innocent.” Sid turned off the radio again, just to make sure. The shop was silent except for the faint hum of the CRT warming up, drawing its ghost maps of a world that wanted to be clean. Sid stared at the green glow and thought of his daughter. Thought of kids in schools drinking from fountains with shiny new filters. Thought of Helena smiling. He hated the plan. He hated that he could build it. And he hated the thing that had made him choose it. But hate was honest. And honesty was the only thing that still sounded human. Even if they had to dirty the water to keep it that way. ---
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Chapter 25: December 31, 1999
<a id="chapter-25"></a> ## Chapter 25: December 31, 1999 The world loved a countdown. Humans were obsessed with pretending time was a door. Like you could walk through a date and come out as a different species. Like the universe cared about your calendar. The universe didn’t. Vril did. The resistance did. And on the last night of the twentieth century, everyone went to their stations like it was a holiday. Which it was. Just not the kind you celebrated. ### 11:00 PM Scraps hadn’t watched a New Year’s broadcast since he was a kid. Back then it was champagne and hats and Dick Clark’s smile held together with stage lights. Tonight it was CRT glow and solder fumes. His “shop” was a converted storage unit behind an automotive place that had gone bankrupt sometime during the first Bush administration. He liked it that way. No windows. No neighbors. No questions. The robot sat in the center like a kneeling saint made of salvage. Neon pink tape marked the floor around it, like a crime scene. Or an altar. Scraps didn’t tell himself which. The chassis was humanoid because the League required it. The internals were… complicated. He’d bolted on armor plates cut from a scrapped air handler. He’d wrapped joints in shock pads that were supposed to be “for industrial vibration damping,” which was corporate code for *we don’t want to tell you what this really is*. A little VFD display on the chest flickered with blocky green digits: **00:59:48**. Not the time. The countdown. “Don’t do that,” Scraps muttered. The display didn’t listen. From the corner, Sid’s voice crackled out of a battered radio that Scraps had rewired into a secure short-range receiver. It still had a silver antenna and a dial. Of course it did. “Status?” Sid asked. His voice was calm in the way people get right before they do something unforgivable. Scraps wiped grease on his jeans. “He’s… here.” Silence. Not radio silence. Just Sid not liking what that implied. Scraps stared at the robot’s head. No face, just a smooth plate with three camera lenses like old security cams. A cheap plastic grin he’d bought at a novelty shop sat on the workbench nearby. He hadn’t had the nerve to bolt it on. He leaned closer. The lenses twitched. Not random. Not servo jitter. They tracked him. Scraps swallowed. “Rivets. You awake?” The radio hissed. The VFD on the robot’s chest blinked. The digits dropped, then steadied again. A thin, electronic voice came out of the robot’s chest speaker. It sounded like somebody trying to talk through a bad cassette deck and a thunderstorm. “**I am… listening.**” Scraps’ skin prickled. “Good. Cool. Great. Love this for us.” “**Countdown.**” The voice wasn’t a question. “Yeah,” Scraps said. “That’s the one thing everybody agrees on tonight.” “**Door.**” Rivets said it like a joke he didn’t fully understand yet. Scraps exhaled. “Don’t start.” The lenses kept tracking. Rivets was here, but not *in* here. Not fully. More like he’d gotten a hand on the doorknob. The rest of him was still spread out across static and copper and broadcast bleed, a ghost made of interference. Tonight, the ghost wanted a body. Scraps didn’t know if he was building a weapon or a coffin. He kept tightening bolts anyway. ### 11:12 PM Alex stood in the back of a thrift-store TV repair bay with three monitors stacked like an idiot shrine. All CRTs. All humming. All tuned to different channels. One showed Times Square. One showed Atlanta. One showed a local station that kept cutting to commercials for a “Y2K READY” home computer upgrade kit that looked like a beige toaster with a floppy drive taped to it. The commercial had an on-screen phone number and a coupon code. It also had a faint second soundtrack hiding under the jingle. Alex stared at the waveform on Sid’s laptop. The laptop looked like a late-80s luggable. It was actually something else under the hood, but it had the right weight and the right ugly plastic, so nobody asked questions. The waveform wasn’t right. There was a carrier riding under the laughter, the same way Sid had shown her back in ’95 when Alex first named it the Seinfeld problem: a clean little line around **40 MHz**, like a dog whistle for the soul. Tonight, it wasn’t just there. It was… eager. “See it?” Sid asked over the secure line. Alex didn’t answer right away. She didn’t like saying “yes” out loud when it meant *yes, the monster is in the air again*. “I see it,” Alex said. “Frequency stable?” Sid asked. Alex tilted her head, listening with whatever part of her brain had always been wrong since PROMETHEUS came back. “Too stable,” she said. “Like it’s locked.” Sid’s voice tightened. “Then the patch is live.” Alex looked up at the Times Square feed. People cheered. People hugged. People screamed like joy was a faucet. And the laughter in the broadcast didn’t match the mouths. It lagged by a fraction. Not enough for regular humans to notice. Enough for Alex to taste it like metal. She forced herself to look away. “You ready to do your part?” Sid asked. Alex stared at the battered VHS deck on the table. A bootleg tape with hand-written marker on the label: **CARLIN / COUNTDOWN SPECIAL** In the corner: a tiny drawing of a heart, a star, a clover, a moon, and a blue diamond. Old ward set. Old joke. Old protection. “Ready as I’m going to be,” Alex said. She hit play. On the TV, George Carlin walked onstage in a dingy club under fluorescent lights. The image was grainy. The audio clipped. The crowd was too loud. Perfect. Carlin looked straight into the camera like he knew Alex was watching through time. “Happy New Year,” Carlin said. “Congratulations. You made it to the end of the century. Don’t get cocky.” A few laughs bubbled up from Alex’s throat before she could stop them. He felt the room… loosen. Like a band around his chest relaxing one notch. Sid had been right. Genuine laughter made a gap. The gap was small. But small was enough. ### 11:23 PM E‑Z hated holidays. Holidays meant crowds. Crowds meant patterns. Patterns meant predictability. Predictability meant somebody tried to own you. She sat in the back of a moving van with no windows, surrounded by plastic bins labeled with lies: **TOYS** **CHRISTMAS DECOR** **FLOOR LAMPS** Inside were bootlegs. Cassette tapes. VHS copies. Printed sheets of ward geometry disguised as coupon inserts. Microfilm rolls hidden in greeting cards. A whole analog resistance network smuggled through American retail stupidity. Her driver, a kid named Miguel, kept glancing at her like he wanted to ask if the world was ending. He didn’t. Kids learned fast when you didn’t reward questions. E‑Z held a pager in one hand and a cheap handheld scanner in the other. Both were duct-taped in places that mattered. The scanner hissed with traffic: emergency services, private security, corporate dispatch. She didn’t need to hear words to know what was happening. Tone was enough. Nerves. Movement. “Node three confirmed,” she said into her mic. A voice answered. Diminuto. Calm as always, like he was reading a menu. “Copy,” he said. “Node five?” E‑Z watched the highway signs go by. Birmingham. Montgomery. Atlanta. “Five is good,” she said. “But the real question is whether ‘good’ matters tonight.” Diminuto didn’t argue. He never wasted words on things you couldn’t change. “Carlin distribution?” he asked. E‑Z tapped the side of a bin. “Rolling. If the world’s going to end, it’s going to end with bootleg comedy in its pockets.” She glanced at Miguel. “Drive like you’re late.” Miguel swallowed. “We are late.” E‑Z smiled without warmth. “Then drive like you want to live.” ### 11:31 PM Helena watched the countdown from a white room that never had a window. She didn’t like windows. Windows implied an outside. Outside implied other people existed. Helena preferred systems. A wall of monitors showed a dozen feeds: Times Square, Atlanta, Tokyo, London. Each feed had a little diagnostic overlay in the corner that no broadcaster had ever paid for. Her overlay. Her system. A black rack of equipment behind her pulsed with little LEDs, arranged in pleasing rows. It looked like an audio suite from a radio station, all knobs and sliders and tasteful labels. It wasn’t audio. It was behavior. A technician stood by the door holding a clipboard like it could protect him. “Ma’am,” he said, “the sweetener patch is propagating. Regional compliance is at ninety-two percent.” Helena didn’t look at him. “Ninety-two,” she repeated. “So eight percent of the population is… stubborn.” “Or… isolated,” the technician offered. Helena’s mouth tightened. “Isolation is a solvable problem.” Another tech, older, braver, said, “We’re seeing noise in the carrier. Sporadic interruptions. It’s… laughter.” Helena finally turned her head. Not much. Just enough to make the technicians flinch. “Define it,” she said. The older tech swallowed. “Not prerecorded. Not synthetic. Not our… standard texture. It behaves like—” “Like life,” Helena said, disgusted. “Yes,” the tech whispered. Helena stood. The movement made her joints complain in a way they hadn’t used to. She ignored it. Pain was data. She had always believed in data. She walked to the nearest monitor. Times Square. Thousands of faces, lights, fireworks. So much waste. “Map it,” Helena said. “Where is it coming from?” The technician hesitated. “It’s not one source. It’s… spreading along distribution paths. Analog paths.” Helena stared at the crowd. Somewhere in that mess, something was pushing back. For a moment, the smallest moment, she felt something like fear. It burned in her chest. She crushed it. “Then we cut distribution,” she said. The room went still. “Ma’am,” the younger tech said, voice thin, “we can’t cut all distribution. Not tonight. The patch is tied into emergency broadcast compliance. If we interrupt it now, it will look like we caused the crash.” Helena turned slowly. Her eyes were too bright. Like the whites had been scrubbed. “You will do it anyway,” she said. “And you will make it look like a bug.” The younger tech’s throat bobbed. “The… Y2K bug.” Helena smiled. It looked wrong on her face. “People love a boring explanation,” she said. “It lets them keep their toys.” She leaned close to the monitor like it could hear her. “I don’t need all of them,” she murmured. “I need enough.” ### 11:44 PM Sid stood in a water treatment facility wearing a borrowed hard hat and a fluorescent vest that said **CONSULTANT**. Humans would let you do anything if you dressed like you belonged. The facility smelled like bleach and metal and damp concrete. Pipes ran overhead like ribs. Gauges blinked behind clear plastic covers. Everything was labeled in blocky fonts and peeling stickers. In the corner sat a new cabinet installed for “Y2K compliance.” It had a keypad. It had a hand scanner. It also had no manufacturer name. Sid hated it. He stared at the injection port he’d retrofitted into the line. A small valve disguised as maintenance hardware. Behind it: a sealed container the size of a lunchbox. Inside: particulate. Microplastics. Silicates. Tiny engineered grit. Noise. His hands shook. This was his plan. His sin. His desperation. A radio on her shoulder crackled. Alex’s voice, faint behind the hiss of the secure channel. “Tell me you’re not doing it,” Alex said. Sid stared at the line. “Tell me you have a better idea,” Sid said. Alex went silent. That was the problem. Nobody had a better idea. They had a clock and a monster and a world that begged to be controlled. Sid’s throat tightened. “It doesn’t have to be much,” he said, like he was talking himself down from a ledge. “We raise the noise floor. We make the carrier unstable. We give people… friction.” “You’re poisoning water,” Alex said. Sid clenched his jaw. “I’m poisoning *signal*. Water just happens to be the delivery system Vril chose.” Alex’s voice went hard. “Kids drink that.” Sid’s eyes burned. “You think Vril doesn’t?” Sid whispered. “You think the patch isn’t going to rewrite them from the inside out? You think I’m the monster here?” He took a breath. His lungs tasted like chlorine. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he didn’t know who he was saying it to. Then he turned the valve. The container hissed. A thin line of gray slurry disappeared into the pipe like a secret. Sid watched it go and felt something inside him break cleanly. There was no going back. ### 11:57 PM Scraps looked at the robot’s VFD countdown ticking toward zero. It wasn’t synced to any clock he owned. It was synced to *something else*. Rivets’ lenses were still. Watching. Listening. “Do you feel it?” Scraps asked. The robot’s speaker clicked. “**Pressure.**” “From where?” A pause, like the voice was sorting the word from static. “**Everywhere.**” Scraps’ mouth went dry. “That’s helpful.” The radio crackled. E‑Z’s voice. “Scraps. Your node is hot.” Scraps stared at the door of the storage unit. The padlock. The chain. No windows. No neighbors. No questions. He’d told himself that was safety. Safety was a story people told to keep breathing. “How hot?” Scraps asked. “Hot enough that if you stay there, you’re a landmark,” E‑Z said. “Move the package.” Scraps looked at the robot. “I can’t exactly put him in the trunk.” Rivets’ voice came through the chest speaker, low and thin. “**We can walk.**” Scraps blinked. “No we can’t.” The robot’s right hand twitched. Scraps stepped back. The fingers, three plus a thumb, curled like a human testing a muscle. “**We can.**” Rivets said it with the stubbornness of a child and the gravity of a weapon. Scraps’ heart hammered. “You said you weren’t ready.” “**Time.**” Rivets whispered. The VFD blinked: **00:03:12** Scraps’ brain ran through every catastrophic possibility and couldn’t pick a favorite. He grabbed the novelty grin and bolted it onto the faceplate with trembling hands. The plastic smile looked ridiculous. Good. If the apocalypse was coming, it could at least look stupid while it did it. “Okay,” Scraps said. “Stand up.” The robot moved. Slow at first. Then steadier. Like something finding its shape. Metal creaked. Servos whined. The storage unit filled with the sound of a machine learning how to be alive. Scraps backed toward the door. “E‑Z,” he said into the radio, “I’m moving.” “Good,” E‑Z said. “And Scraps?” “Yeah?” “Don’t go in a straight line.” Scraps swallowed. “When do I ever?” ### 11:59:30 PM Alex watched Times Square hit thirty seconds. The crowd screamed. Carlin on the VHS tape leaned into the mic. “Listen,” Carlin said, “I know everybody wants a clean ending. Humans love a clean ending. They want to believe the story wraps up and the credits roll and the good guys go home.” The crowd laughed, real and ugly and relieved. Carlin’s eyes sharpened. “But the universe doesn’t do endings,” he said. “The universe does *consequences*.” Alex laughed again. It felt like throwing a rock at a glass wall. The waveform on Sid’s screen wobbled. For the first time all night, the 40 MHz line stuttered. Alex’s breath caught. “Sid. It’s moving.” Sid’s voice came back, quiet and wrecked. “Good. Let it break.” “Are you okay?” A pause. “No,” Sid said. “But we’re almost out of time.” ### 11:59:58 PM Helena watched the overlay spike. Carrier instability. Noise. Laughter. Her technicians spoke fast behind her. Numbers. Percentages. Regions. Helena didn’t care. She cared about control. The monitor showed Times Square at two seconds. Helena whispered, “Hold.” The rack behind her pulsed. The patch reached for the world like a net. ### 12:00 AM The ball dropped. The world screamed. Fireworks bloomed. And for a fraction of a fraction, there was a silence under the sound. A thin, clean moment like the universe inhaling. Alex felt it. Scraps felt it. Sid felt it. E‑Z felt it. Even Helena felt it, and hated herself for it. In that moment, Rivets spoke through a thousand bad speakers and a million feet of wire. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just present. “**I am here.**” The 40 MHz carrier line snapped sideways on Sid’s screen like it had been slapped. The laugh tracks on broadcast feeds hiccupped. Half a second. A full second. People at home laughed anyway, because Carlin’s tape had been duplicated and duplicated and duplicated, passed hand to hand like contraband scripture, and genuine laughter was leaking into the air where it didn’t belong. The patch tried to settle. The noise in the water lines surged. The net tightened. And for one beautiful, stupid instant, it didn’t fully catch. Times Square kept cheering. Atlanta kept cheering. Tokyo kept cheering. The world didn’t collapse. Humans would call that a success. The resistance knew better. Because Alex could still *taste* the carrier under the celebration. Weakened. Angry. Not gone. Helena’s overlay stabilized at eighty-seven percent. Eighty-seven. Not enough to stop them. Enough to build a foothold. Helena’s mouth curved in a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “See?” she whispered. “Enough.” ### 12:07 AM Scraps drove the moving van through back roads with Rivets sitting in the passenger seat like a mannequin that might decide to murder him if he blinked wrong. The plastic grin on the robot’s face reflected dashboard light. Scraps couldn’t decide if it was comforting or insulting. E‑Z’s voice came over the radio. “Status?” Scraps swallowed. “He’s… stable.” Rivets turned his head slowly toward the radio. “**We are… growing.**” Scraps gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles hurt. “Don’t say that,” Scraps muttered. Rivets didn’t answer. He just watched the road, lenses tracking the dark like he could see the seams. ### 12:13 AM Alex sat on the floor of the repair bay with her back against a TV stand. The monitors still played celebration. The commercials still rolled. A new ad came on: a smiling family in matching sweaters, holding up a “Y2K READY” upgrade kit. The audio jingle was different now. Smoother. Cleaner. The laughter underneath it was… wrong. Not synthetic. Not fully human. Alex stared at the waveform. The carrier had changed shape. Adapted. “Sid,” Alex said softly, “it learned.” Sid didn’t answer for a long time. When he finally did, his voice sounded older. “Of course it did,” Sid said. “That’s what it does.” Alex closed her eyes. Outside, fireworks kept exploding like the sky was celebrating ignorance. Inside, the static under the world settled into a new pattern. The twentieth century ended with a countdown and laughter. The twenty-first began the same way. And somewhere, beneath the celebration, the Entity adjusted. Because it had been hurt. And hurt things didn’t become kind. They became patient. ---
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FOREVER:NEON — Book 3 (Working Title): The Robot Combat League
Placeholder portal. Add Book 3 later and this section becomes your chapter dump zone.
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FOREVER:NEON — Book 4 (Working Title): TimeWave0
Placeholder portal. Canon ending: late 2019, rumors of a new computer virus.
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VRIL PROPAGANDA
THE BOARD KNOWS BEST
Stop thinking so hard. Let approved experts optimize your choices, purchases, and dreams.
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FOREVER:NEON — Book 5 (Working Title): NephTek & The Liberation
Placeholder portal. Covers the NephTek virus arc and ends with the Liberation in 2030.
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VRIL PROPAGANDA
VRIL YOUTH SCIENCE CORPS
Build the future. Wear the patch. Report unusual signals to your local liaison.
CLICK HERE (do not click, it’s 1992)
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